A Yearning for the Mud
by SomeoftheFame
Summary: Wallace Pearce, heir to a multi-million dollar corporation, flees from home after an accident results in casualty. Scared and on the run, Wallace looks to escape his current life by starting a new one at a higher education Pokémon school, Radix University. But Wallace quickly learns that his actions have consequences not even he can outrun. SYOC.
1. The Prologue

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud**  
 **Chapter One - The Prologue**

 _What might have been is an abstraction  
_ _R_ _emaining a perpetual possibility  
_ _O_ _nly in a world of speculation._ _\- T.S. Eliot_

* * *

He was alone. Even at a late hour the city was alive, music and voices could be heard through the walls and vendors were still working on the boulevard, but none of it could comfort him. The sun had abandoned its post in the sky long ago and vanished below the skyline, off to brighten someone else's day. The moon was nowhere in sight and the stars, as usual, were overshadowed by the lights of Lumiose. The city's landmark shone the brightest and lent its ashen light to a young man as he sprinted through the city's dank alleyways. Stone, licked wet by rainfall, squelched under his shoes as he pumped his legs harder, the sounds of barking, squealing tires, and sirens all urging him to run faster.

A headlight flashed across the wall above him just as he darted out into a plaza. The moment he stopped moving the exhaustion took over. He hunched over, hands on his knees, as his lungs cried out for air. He raised his head in search of a place to hide and found nothing but an obelisk in the center of the plaza's field.

"Water." His head bobbed side to side, trying to focus in on the bubbling sound of running water.

His leg muscles throbbed in protest as he ran across the plaza and around a short curve into an avenue. He stopped in the middle of a stone bridge that connected the halves of the residential avenue, and turned to face the tower. While the waters leading to Lumiose's sewers churned under him he weighed his options, would Clemont be of any help or would hiding there make this into a bigger mess?

Before he had time to give it any further thought a pair of lights emerged from around the corner leading to another plaza. He recoiled from the beams and moved to turn back when another set of lights emerged, blocking his path.

Panic filled him as he raised his arms to block the lights. He took a cautious step back, but froze hearing the unmistakable sound of a Poké Ball being opened. He threw a glance over his shoulder in time to see a vibrant red beam shatter the darkness and form into a fiendish figure he couldn't quite recognize.

"Put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees!"

He flinched at the sound of a man's voice, magnified by a speaker, and nearly complied out of instinct, but his fear kept him frozen in place.

The four figures around him slowly tightened and more Poké Balls were launched and more Pokémon, of varying shapes and sizes, joined his pursuers along the edge of the avenue. A Poké Ball breaking open on the pavement just a few yards from him made him shudder and think to take off running, but he realized they had blocked him from escaping.

"Vileplume, use sleep powder."

Over the sound of his ragged breathing he heard a soft **_pop_ ** in the air and what felt like snow began to dust his arms. Although he had nowhere to go he backed up to the edge of the bridge and brought his arm across his nose.

"Wartortle, water gun!"

He whipped around to his left just in time for the gush of water to hit him, legs first. He moaned as the impact knocked him off balance, the rubber of his shoes slipped on the wet stone and he toppled over. His chest smacked the bridge before the stream of water pushed him over the edge to the icy black water below.

Panic flooded his mind and before he could manage to get his feet under him he hit the water at a slant. A shotgun blast of pain exploded through his right ankle, and his chest, still throbbing from the fall, hit the water like a canon. His sight vanished as he sunk and the water snaked into his nose and gagged him, trying desperately to fill his lungs.

He struggled to breach the surface as his throat tied itself into a knot. Voices ripped through the roar and slush of the water while his veins thundered with pumping blood as his body craved air. He flailed in the water, trying to find the surface, but everything was dark and cold, up was right and down was left; everything a maze of confusion.

He whirled around, the sound of pokémon moving in the water around him suddenly became as frightening as the thought that he might drown. While he struggled to right himself the water pushed and pulled him, to where he didn't know until he was slammed against a row of metal bars.

He coughed out the last of his air as his head broke the surface. He sputtered as a pair of glowing eyes attached to a serpentine body fell on him further down the canal. "Please," he cried. Wallace stopped resisting the water and let it push him back when he noticed his arm and shoulder slipped through a gap. He turned himself over, going with the current that pressed him harder against the bars and realized there was a sizable gap.

Angling his body and using the push of the water he attempted to squeeze through the bars. Thin as he was, he sucked in his stomach and pushed himself as hard as he could to fit. The cold metal bars might as well have been mountains threatening to break his ribs as he pushed harder.

A cry of desperation flew out from between his lips as he recalled a distant memory from his childhood. He'd dropped a ball behind his mother's dresser and was able to reach it, but not by pulling it out from the side. Rather than find another way to retrieve it, he continued to tug and pull the ball out and realized that by twisting and turning it the ball somehow came lose.

Imagining himself as simply stuck between two things, rather than trapped in a life or death situation, he twisted his body the best he could while tilting forward. To his surprise the bar against his chest shifted down against his ribs and he felt the pressure ease as his lower body slipped through.

Despite his best efforts to remain above water, beyond the bars the canal opened wider and deeper, causing the water to move at an alarming speed and it quickly dragged him back under into the darkness.

* * *

End of Chapter One

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Character submission is currently closed, but may reopen in the future.


	2. Wallace

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Two - Wallace**

 _This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. -T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace stood alone on a balcony that overlooked the verdant garden of Parfum Palace. Its lawn stretched out in front of him as the sun set on the horizon. The grounds basked in the pallid pinks and lurid reds that remained in the sky with wispy shreds of clouds, wasted by the wind, lingering behind.

From the flora bounds of the garden to a shimmering pond under the Palace, attendants maneuvered through hedge mazes, serving guests a vast array of finger foods and champagne. The region's top trainers, professors, and most influential men and women of business lingered around the garden's attractions, a round black fountain, busts of Poké Balls, and perhaps the most grand of its structures, two nearly life-size effigies of legends from a foreign region.

It was a subconscious choice to relocate to the balcony, but escaping the garden would ultimately be the best thing for him. Everything about the party below reeked of money and overindulgence, starting with the chosen location. Parfum Palace, a castle built by a long-dead king to flaunt his power and wealth. Wallace couldn't help but think that his father had rented the location for the exact same reason. Sure, the official word was that it was a birthday/welcome home party for the son of his business partner, but he got the impression his father wanted to prove his fortune was as grand as a king's.

He wouldn't blame his father if these parties were thrown in a palatial style for the wellbeing of the guests. Wallace saw no harm is spending money when it was for the benefit of others, but he was sure father did it to benefit his own ego. He might as well have hung a banner outside saying 'look at what my money can buy!' Maybe after achieving enough success for three lifetimes his father was entitled to show it off.

In the realm of trainer technology, devices with the most innovative features were hitting the market every six months, with software updates coming even more frequently, and small advances happening at an even more alarming rate. Articles described it as a time of plateauing greatness, a time that begged for someone to come along and collapse the progressive nature of trainer technology in on itself, pack it neatly into a box, and rocket it into a new dimension. That someone was Arlan Pearce.

Businesses like Silph Co. had a solid lock on producing mobile devices and items to the benefit of trainers and pokémon, but the growing influence of private inventors couldn't be ignored. Unknown minds were emerging and banding together to bring forth life changing equipment and systems into the pokémon world, like Bill had done two decades ago. Arlan Pearce had a vision for the future and an inherited fortune at his disposal, so he divided up his wealth to supply the capital needed to produce the inventions of independent creators in bulk and distribute them to the masses.

As a result of Arlan's involvement, the Pokédex was no longer a rare item handed out by professors to aid their research. Instead they became a staple supply item to any trainer looking to have a worthwhile journey. Every trainer was given an item like the PokéGear, PokéNav, Pokétch, and Xtransceiver at the start of their journey and was encouraged to use it often. As the items became more widely known and available the demand for more features skyrocketed. Overtime, smaller inventions were released all in an effort to make trainer's lives easier and give them ways to share their adventures with the world.

Until then, Arlan was merely the man who provided funding, but as his name and services became more widely known he too placed himself into the pool of inventors with the creation of his company Pearce Productions, and the creation of PokéView. With it, trainers were able to record and upload videos of their journey from anywhere in the world. The success of PokéView caused a boost in popularity of the trainer lifestyle and the result of more pre-teens longing to become trainers was that every item distributed by Pearce Productions was in high demand.

Wallace had read too many articles about his dad, ones that called him a business genius and a suited saint of the pokémon world. While he didn't see eye to eye on everything his father believed in, he couldn't deny that his rise to the world's wealthiest man wasn't brilliant. He became the number one distributor for trainer items, created a program that turned trainer technology into the biggest product in the world, and when every child wanted to become a trainer their parents had only one place to turn, back to him. Wallace was sure he'd read about something similar, a hero's complex or something.

From down below came a faint bout of laughter and glasses clinking. Then a man's voice drifted up to the veranda: "Happy birthday, Drew!"

"Happy birthday." His throat was dry, he'd barely spoken to anyone all evening, and the word came out like a wheeze. He didn't have a glass, but Wallace lifted the corners of his mouth into a pithy smile. He felt disheartened about the party and it made him feel vaguely ashamed. Because regardless of his father's intentions, the ostensible reason was to celebrate his friend's birthday and homecoming. So why wasn't he celebrating with everyone else?

"Have you been here the entire time?"

Wallace pulled away from his thoughts and turned to find the man himself—Arlan Pearce—stepping onto the balcony. He fastened a single button on his white tux jacket and sauntered onto the balcony as if he were there to accept an award. His brown eyes surveyed the balcony as if to make a point that it was empty and therefore saw no reason why anyone would be there instead of at the party.

He didn't answer; doubtful his father cared to hear it. Wallace watched his father move to the balustrade and gaze out over the property as if it were his for eternity, not just a night. "I'm going to offer Andrew a position at Pearce Productions," said Arlan.

"Okay?" he asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"It's the junior executive position," Arlan said in a labored breath as he squinted out over the party.

His lips spread into a smug smile, realizing his father's tone came from having to explain it to him. He'd probably hoped Wallace would glean it for himself without him having to come right out and say he was giving his job to Andrew. To be fair it wasn't exactly his job, but the position as a junior executive at Pearce Productions' main office in Lumiose City had been promised to him years ago and was supposed to start next week.

It wasn't something he'd been looking forward to, he only agreed to it because he'd been groomed for a job with his father for the past eight years. His tenth birthday didn't include a going away party and gifts a new trainer might get; instead he began a home schooling program focused in business and finance. Because what ten year old didn't need to know how to develop a projected growth ratio assessment analysis?

"I'm going to make the announcement before the fireworks," Arlan said.

Wallace fell back into his sour mood of thinking his father spent money just for the sake of spending it. "Fireworks."

"It's a big day." Arlan leaned back against the rail, a smugness creeping into his voice. "He's your best friend, you should be happy for him. He made it through six regions in nine years and every step was documented through my technology. Now he's come back home, in time for his birthday, to start a career with the company that made him a sensation. Cheers." Arlan reached into his inner breast pocket and withdrew a slender black microphone.

Wallace wanted to point out his father wasn't holding a glass, but his mother's voice in the back of his mind kept him quiet, don't upset your father, not now.

There was a faint click from the microphone followed by several thumps as Arlan tested the piece of equipment out. "If I could have your attention. My son and I wanted to thank you all for coming to celebrate with us tonight," Arlan said.

The guests below began to gather at the front of the garden, emerging from the maze of shrubs like children when the street lights came on. Wallace listened as a rumble of applause started below, for what he wasn't sure, his father's presence maybe.

"We're here to celebrate the life and achievements of Andrew Gates. Andrew left Lumiose City nine years ago to start his journey and even though he was only ten, I knew he was going to succeed. But how could he fail? He had the best equipment money could buy." Arlan paused to laugh and the crowd joined in without missing a beat.

"Before his going away party, I wondered, what do you get a ten year old about to embark on a life changing journey?" Arlan said, adding a dramatic pause as if he were facing the same dilemma again. "Then I thought about Andrew's family and of my own son, Wallace."

Wallace jolted up straight and glanced to his father whose eyes were shining with expectancy and lips were spread in a tight smile. There was a light patter of delayed clapping from below, as if the crowd wasn't sure if they should clap and figured it out too late. Despite the derisory ovation, Wallace found himself giving a short wave to the crowd.

"Wallace and Andrew have known each other since they were infants and for the first time in ten years they were going to be separated, the same for Andrew and his parents. So I thought, why not give him something to keep all of them connected?" Arlan said. "I created the PokéView, the most innovative and commercially successful piece of trainer technology in half a decade, and gave it to Andrew. With it he traveled and documented every blade of grass, cave, and stretch of water that Kalos has to offer. His wild battles and gym challenges became instant sensations once they hit the internet and it allowed all of us to remain with Andrew as he embarked on his adventure."

Wallace knew it was more than watching a journey unfold on screen that made Andrew's story a hit, it was Andrew himself. He wasn't any run of the mill trainer, he picked up strategy and skill over the course of his journey. But more than that it was the spectacle of Andrew experiencing the world that made it a joy to watch. He found time to dedicate himself to any group or volunteer organization he came across during his travels, day-care jobs, city tours, junior ranger teams, and every pokémon rescue mission. No matter what he got himself into it never shook him from his journey, regardless whether it was a few weeks spent searching for a bug-type or a few days spent fishing up magikarp. Andrew was also a fool at times, but could afford to be. Like Wallace, he hailed from old money, generations of it. Too many times during his trip he would triumph over a gym leader one minute and then forget which badge he had just won.

Arlan's voice spread through the garden as another wave of applause died away. "Although Andrew didn't become the champion of Kalos, he succeeded in another way. Because of PokéView he became a young hero, a public figure, and a viral hit. So imagine my surprise when I heard that he wouldn't be returning home, instead he decided to set out for other regions, Kanto first. By the time Andrew had collected his eighth badge PokéView was released publicly and the sales were through the roof. Even as every trainer was posting their battles online for the world to see, Andrew always led the pack. We followed him through each of the regions, through every triumph over the course of nine years. Thank you, Andrew." Arlan said with a flourish.

"Thank you for making me filthy rich," Wallace said under his breath before the crowd erupted in another wave of applause and cheers, this time directed at Andrew. He watched as hands jostled Andrew and men in suits clapped their hands on his back.

"And now Andrew is home," Arlan said over the sound of cheering. "But what does a marvel like Andrew do after taking on the world? Well, I'd like to think he'd accept this offer and join me at Pearce Productions as a junior executive and help pave the future for trainer technology. What do you say, Andrew?"

An expected series of gasps and applause followed his father's words and Wallace watched Andrew, not wanting to miss his reaction, but he didn't expect for Andrew to break away from the crowd swarming on him. The party goers seemed to be as confused as he was when Andrew made a beeline for the bridge that connected the Palace to its garden.

The applause that did start quickly faded and then swelled into a roar of murmurs. Wallace watched as Andrew made it to the bridge and he faintly heard someone—Andrew's father maybe—call out his name, to which Andrew barked back a firm: "No!".

Arlan cleared his throat into the mic, bringing the party's focus back to him. "I guess I should have sweetened the deal by offering him my office too."

The crowd erupted into a fit of laughter and Arlan took the opportunity to cut off the mic and turn to Wallace. "Go get your friend," he said.

Wallace heard the anger in the bellow of his voice and nodded before he headed back to the doorway. "I'll go find him," he said.

He'd been dragged to the Palace by his father several times leading up to the party, but hadn't noticed the splendor and wealth that oozed from every inch of the halls. Enameled walls, gilded chandeliers, gold plated suits of armor, ivory and ebony tiles on the staircase. He was admiring the detail of a golden painting frame when he found Andrew in the Palace lobby, sharing a platform with the statue of a serpentine pokémon.

His head was hung, but his back was straight and every follicle of his platinum blond hair seemed to be in place. He hunched over, but his tuxedo remained creased in the right angles and didn't seem to bunch up anywhere. Rather than a party runaway he looked like a temperamental model on the break from a shoot. Even distraught, his moony friend looked the picture of aristocracy.

"Did they send you to bring me back?" Andrew asked, peering out at him from the corner of his eye.

Wallace considered a witty comeback, but something in Andrew's voice told him it wasn't the time for jokes. "Let me guess, you don't want to work at PP," Wallace said as he eased down onto the platform.

"What the hell was that?" Andrew asked as he raised his head, Wallace could see a potent mixture of anger and confusion. "That job is yours, has been for as long as I can remember, and now he wants to hand it to me?"

"He told me just before the announcement," Wallace said, as if it was a consolation.

"Well I don't want it," Andrew said, restating what Wallace had already gleaned. "And I'm done doing work for him. I spent nine years out there, you can't imagine what that was like."

Wallace smiled and dropped his gaze to his hands, his fingers fiddling nervously with each other. "I watched every one of your streams," he said. "I have an idea."

"But what isn't on those streams is how much I missed home, my mom and dad," Andrew said. "I stayed with strangers and they were great, but it made me realize just how much I missed Lumiose. I missed sleeping in my own bed, my family, I missed you."

"So he's reason you didn't come home after the league?" he asked.

"Yeah," Andrew said. "PokéView was getting major release sales, but he didn't think it would last through the first year. He called Kanto's professor and told him I was interested in taking the challenge. My flight was paid for and when I got there I had all new equipment, the professor let me choose a starter and I got set up with a host family."

"Well, you're home now," Wallace said. "For good?"

"Well he offered me a job here, so yeah I'm guessing he doesn't have any plans to send me back out there. Unless he pulls a seventh region out of his ass and wants me to trek it for the sales of PokéView," Andrew said.

* * *

After spending what felt like the better half of an hour in the lobby, Wallace had somehow managed to convince Andrew to rejoin the party, a feat he wasn't able to convince himself to undertake for another thirty minutes.

By the time he'd made it into the garden the sun had sank below the tree line and a purple to blue gradient blanketed the sky.

He wandered around the entrance of the yard, not wanting to delve much deeper into the party than necessary, and noticed a small band had formed at the entrance of the hedges, backdropped by a wall of roses. Composed entirely of string and wind instruments, the performers were in the middle of a slow tune that had the party guests dancing in pairs.

Wallace's first instinct – after distancing himself away from dancing couples – was to find Andrew, but he didn't find him as much as stumble upon him as his eyes were drawn to Andrew's dancing partner first, or rather her voice.

Barely audible over the soft chords the small orchestra was producing was her airy song. Wallace followed his ears and found a girl in an electric blue cocktail dress draped in Andrew's arms. Her short legs were bent and looked like they were barely holding her up, like she might collapse into a pile if Andrew's hands were to suddenly disappear from their place below her hips.

Her hair was shock white and seemed to be dyed to perfection as light blue streaks converged together at the start of a high ponytail. Her hair ended just above the back of her knees and swayed left and right as she teetered on a pair of black heels. Her arms were tucked in between her and Andrew with one hand rubbing lines into the back of his hair while the other traced the line of his jaw. Their eyes bored into each other like they might be the only two at the party while the girl's mouth opened and closed rhythmically, producing a sound not unlike the violin's as she sang.

The more he focused, Wallace could make out the words to Happy Birthday, but it didn't sound like any Happy Birthday he'd ever heard. Her lips moved slowly and precisely as they formed each syllable and breathed sound into every word that dribbled off her lips like a secret.

His first thought was that Andrew ran into her and convinced her for to dance, but the more he watched the more Wallace came to realize the girl was probably the one to initiate this meeting. Just by looking at her Wallace could tell she was some kind of performer and she'd chosen everything to make it the perfect moment.

The sky was wringing out the last bits of sunshine and starlight was bleeding through the atmosphere. The music swelled in the background and here she was, standing out in her blue dress amongst the crowd of old women and men in all black, a radiant sapphire against a dark background. Wallace could see it in the way her hips moved that she was leading the dance and Andrew was simply along for the ride and by the way she finished her song, her lips trembling against his ear, he could only guess when and where that ride might end.

A pair of fingers snapping in his face startled Wallace out of his trance and alerted him to the fact he wasn't alone. Andrew's father, Charles, stood beside him, practically the spitting image of Andrew only older with years of stress etched into his face. But without it Charles could have been Andrew's older brother, same hair so blond it could only be natural, same well-defined features and angles to their faces. Rather than a mirror it must have been like looking into a time machine for Andrew.

"Oh, hi Mr. Gates," Wallace said. "I'm sorry, I – I zoned out for a minute." Wallace looked back to where Andrew had been and found the spot empty and wondered just how long he had been staring.

"Her name's Azalea," Charles said, with his arm out and pointing towards the bridge.

Wallace followed it and found Andrew and the girl, Azalea, as part of a small circle by the water. She must have said something hilarious because everyone around her was doubled over in stitches. "You know her?" He asked.

"No," Charles sighed. "I was trying to get Andrew to apologize to your dad, but she walked up, introduced herself, and before I knew it the two of them were gone."

Wallace's mouth fell into a hard flat line, he was right; she sought Andrew out and was doing whatever she could to keep him to herself. Even standing as part of a group she had linked arms with him, some kind of territorial message to the other girls in the circle.

"Cheer up, Wallace, it's a party." Charles nudged Wallace with his elbow, again bringing him back out of his thoughts.

"I know a total of three people here," Wallace said, dryly.

"Never a bad time to make new friends." Charles rolled forward onto the tips of his toes and scanned the party guests. "I'm sure there's someone around to kill time with."

Although he wasn't locked inside his head again, Wallace hadn't taken his eyes off Andrew and Azalea. "I haven't seen him in nine years, but he's still my best friend, he's home, and it's his birthday. So why aren't I happy?"

Charles clamped a hand down into the back of Wallace's neck and gave it a good squeeze. "I don't know, but your dad went through a lot of trouble for this party and I'd hate to leave you standing here knowing you won't move an inch and you won't enjoy this special night. You don't realize how lucky you are, so many young men and women would kill to live a day in your life and you're standing here, like you've got it so bad."

"Is that the speech you gave Andrew before you told him to apologize?" Wallace raised a skeptical eyebrow to Charles.

Charles grinned and let out a hearty chuckle as he squeezed the nape of Wallace's neck again. "I changed a few words around, but pretty much!"

"Well thanks for trying." Wallace sighed and shrugged off his hand before he walked away. "But I think I'm going to leave, enjoy the party Mr. Gates. Tell Andrew I said happy birthday."

Wallace didn't hear Charles' reply over the sound of the band as he moved further away and walked the long way to avoid being seen by Andrew as he made his way to the bridge.

* * *

A different kind of teenager might have left one party to attend another, but Wallace found himself desperately wanting to return home. It didn't take long, after a call to his father's escort and a short flight on the back of a large brown bird pokémon, Wallace laid across his bed in Lumiose, eyes focused on the moon. It was full and seemed as gigantic as ever as it hung in the sky outside his window, looking close enough for him to reach out and scratch its surface. The air had to be unusually clear for him to be able to see the moon so clearly. Lying prone on his bed, bathed in its wan light, he could see every ridge and crater on the fat satellite.

A dull hum and a vibrating sensation against his hips snapped him out of his lunar trance as he wiggled around and pulled his phone out from under him. Warm from his body heat, Wallace unlocked the screen which then flooded his room with artificial light, putting the moon's illumination to shame.

NEW MESSAGE FROM DREW

Squinting, Wallace clicked the prompt and small box appeared at the top of his screen with just a single word in it, _outside_. Wallace crawled up on his bed and peered down out his window, expecting to find Andrew down below, but the alley that his room overlooked was deserted.

Despite a late summer chill in the air, Wallace rolled out of bed in just a t-shirt and shorts, and padded across his room. He wasn't sure what time it was, but surely several hours had passed since he left the party and his sleeping pill addict of a father was most likely out for the count.

Wallace climbed down a flight of stairs that led to the house's foyer, a pristine hall of textured white tiles and cream colored walls. Wallace passed grand portraits of his dead relatives and other stuffy looking men and women he didn't know until he reached the front door. He peered through the peephole and sure enough Andrew stood just outside, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, his head whipping side to side.

Wallace kept his eyes on his friend as he undid each of the locks on the door and then opened it to let Andrew in. "What's up?"

"Hey," Andrew said, bringing the scent of the night air with him as he stepped inside. "Where's your dad?"

"Asleep probably," Wallace said, fighting back a yawn. "Why, what's up? It's the middle of the night."

"He threatened my dad." Andrew walked to the base of the stairs before he turned on his heel and paced back to the door.

"What?" Wallace asked, standing to the side, watching Andrew's nervous gait.

Andrew's pace quickened and his turns became sharper. "He threatened to take away his job, sue him, and take everything we have if he went any further with it."

"What? Drew, what? Any further with what? You're not making sense, sit down." Wallace gestured to the staircase and reached to place a hand on Andrew's shoulder.

Andrew threw his arms up, knocking Wallace's hand off before he took a step back and raised his hand to Wallace. "Don't touch me," he said, his tone implying a warning. Andrew took a moment to breath that seemed to calm him physically and his eyes locked onto a spot on the floor. "Did you know about this?"

Wallace kept his hands in front of him, not wanting to upset Andrew any more. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about your dad!" Andrew's hand vanished into his pocket and came out with a small piece of plastic in his fist.

"What's that?"

"A flash drive," Andrew said, gripping the black drive with just his fingers to show it off. "Everything your dad has been doing is on here, tell me you don't know anything about his business."

"Of course I know about the business, but I – I still don't understand what's happening."

"Your dad, he's a thief! That's what's happening. He's been stealing money from all the little companies that hire Pearce Productions. You want your Pokédex made in bulk or you want your Pokétch shipped to another region? Pay your dad to do it! He'll make you pay this ridiculous price and they'll make it, but at half the cost he told you and the money that's left over, your dad keeps!"

"What?"

"I have the proof, Wallace!" Andrew shook his hand holding the drive in the air. "I wanted my dad to talk to him about it, get him to come clean and make things right, but he threatened to sue him if he went public with it. But if he keeps quiet he gets a promotion, that's how I know I'm right. That job he offered me today, that was part of the deal."

"Drew, you're wrong. My dad can't be – it's not possible that he's stealing money."

"Why are you defending him? You don't even like him," Andrew said, his face scrunching in confusion as he looked Wallace up and down.

"I'm not defending him, I just can't believe what you're saying is true." Even with just pale moonlight illuminating the foyer Wallace could see the lines of Andrew's face hardening in frustration. The corrugation on the plains of his face made him age several years and that much more frightening in the twilight.

"Deny it, fine. But if your dad doesn't admit it and come clean I'm going to the police." Andrew brushed past Wallace and started up the staircase. "He doesn't scare me."

"Why are you doing this, what did he do to you?" Wallace asked, his voice barely above a whimper. "Because he kept you away from home? Because of what you told me earlier?"

"That's not it," Andrew said before he turned and looked back down the steps. "But when I was out there I met so many people who live and breathe their inventions, who bet on someone like your dad to come along and see what they're worth. Knowing that he's ripping these hardworking people off makes me sick. Just look at the party he threw for me, I mean, we partied in a castle, Wallace. All the things he's been able to do came at the cost of other people's livelihood."

"You're acting like I asked for any of this," Wallace said. "When have I ever wanted to be a part of my father's business, I would have killed to go on an adventure like you, but I had to stay here and learn the business from the ground up. There wasn't any other choice for me."

Andrew remained like a statue on the staircase, half of his body blotted out by darkness, but Wallace was sure he could see his eyes shining in the gloom, boring holes into him.

Wallace dropped his gaze to the first step and sighed. "Say something."

"That's why I can't believe you—why I can't trust you—you're just like him," Andrew said. "We knew everything about each other before I left, but I changed out there. Hell, I changed from just a few hours ago, because now I have a responsibility to stand up for the people who've been robbed by your dad and are too afraid to do it themselves. Nine years ago, would you ever have imagined I'd be this person today?"

"No," Wallace said quietly.

"So then you can understand why I can't put my faith in you to help me do the right thing," Andrew said. "Being out in the world, relying on the kindness of strangers, and the friends I made along the way. I know how that changed me. So I can only imagine how being under your dad's wing changed you. You've probably learned every trick he had to teach you so you could take his place someday."

"I don't care about the company, Drew!" Wallace said. "How can you say that, when have I ever wanted to be a part of it?"

"I'm not sure, but I'm not sure about anything anymore," Andrew said as he raised the flash drive again. "Except for what I saw out there. But if you want to prove to me you're not like him, that you're not okay with this, then help me." Andrew took a step down and extended his hand with the drive resting in his palm to Wallace.

"I can't," Wallace said without thinking, his eyes locked on the drive.

Andrew's hand clamped shut on the flash drive, the muscles in his arm tensing as he tightened his fist. "Why not?" He asked, anger flaring in his voice.

"What if you're right, what will happen to us?" Wallace asked.

"You'll probably lose everything." Andrew's words came without thought or any trace of emotion.

"You'd be okay with that?" Wallace croaked.

"I'm not okay with your dad stealing millions from innocent people! You shouldn't be either. I hate to think that you'd lose your home, but what your dad's doing isn't right. I'm sorry, but I can't let it go." Andrew shook his fist, closed tightly around the flash drive, at Wallace. "If I let these people continue to be robbed I'm no better than him."

With that Andrew turned and climbed up the steps and Wallace trotted up the staircase after him, his hand shooting out and latching onto the crook of Andrew's arm. "Wait!"

Andrew snatched his arm back and whipped around on Wallace who took a cautious step back down the stairs. Maybe it was Andrew's position above him on the stairs, or the fury in his eyes, but Wallace's throat tightened around any words he might have said. Instead he watched Andrew turn and climb the last stretch of steps before he rushed him. Wallace darted up the steps and shot his hand out like a snake and ripped the flash drive from Andrew's hand. Without thinking he kept going, only getting a few steps ahead before Andrew rammed him.

Their shoulders hit first and the blow knocked Wallace off his feet. Andrew put all of his weight into Wallace and both boys hit the stairs, the hard edges digging into Wallace's chin and chest once he hit. Andrew rolled and latched onto the back of Wallace's shirt before he shook him, harmlessly at first, but then Wallace's head hit the steps with a flash of white pain across his vision.

"Give it back!" Andrew said with a mouth full of spit that sprayed the back of Wallace's neck and his ear before he pressed him back onto the stairs.

Andrew shifted his weight from straddling Wallace and rolled him over. Once on his back, Wallace's arm shot up and the bottom of his palm connected with Andrew's jaw. Andrew's mouth snapped shut, his teeth digging up into the bottom of his tongue, he then reared back and groaned in pain before his head whipped back and forth.

In the brief moment of respite Wallace took note of his empty palm, the flash drive had fallen from his grasp when they hit. Wallace craned his neck around and spotted the drive laying two steps up. He stretched and his fingers grazed the edge of the drive as he tried to scoot it closer.

Before Wallace could get his hand around it, Andrew's arm stretched overhead and he snatched the flash drive off the step. Wallace turned back in time for Andrew to land a punch to his temple. Wallace's head jerked to the side on impact and then slowly wheeled back around to center. When he did, Andrew shifted his position, still astride, and pressed his fists to Wallace's chest.

Again, Wallace's hands shot up, this time he hooked both of them into the pits under Andrew's arms and tried to force them up, but soon realized his mistake as Andrew brought his arms down and trapped his hands. Before he saw it a fist came back around and beamed him on the other side of his head.

Wallace recoiled from the wallop that struck bone below his eye. In his daze, Wallace realized the hold on his hands had slackened and his yanked back before Andrew noticed. Free of the grip he pushed against Andrew's shoulder that faced him and managed to give the boy a good shove that caused him to tumble onto his side.

Wallace lunged and managed to get his hands around the drive, and with a jerk, tried to pull it from Andrew's hands. Andrew's grip on the drive tightened and Wallace only managed to pull Andrew into a sitting position.

Both upright they continued to struggle for the drive before Andrew threw his weight into Wallace and knocked him back. They were wriggling against the steps, struggling for dominance with four hands wrapped around the drive before Andrew pried away Wallace's hands.

On top, Andrew shifted into a vertical position and slowly untangled his legs from Wallace's as he stood. He looked to his fist, the flash drive sat firmly in the palm of his hand.

Wallace remained still, except for his heaving chest with his arms hovering above his face, in fear of another blow. "Drew, don't do this. You're going to ruin my family."

"Your dad tried to ruin mine first," Andrew said, out of breath. He took a large step, moving to step past Wallace, but hooked his foot in the crook of Wallace's arm and missed the step. The bottom of his shoe connected with the edge of the step and slipped off. Andrew lost his balance and was pin-wheeling, staggering and stomping back. One foot came crashing down on Wallace's thigh and the other dinged him in the back of the head as Andrew's hands grasped for stability.

Wallace watched in shock as Andrew gripped the railing, but didn't stop. Instead his body continued to fall back while his arm remained in place on the rail, twisting and cracking before he released his hold on it. Andrew was still trying to get his balance when his foot hit the step at an angle and Wallace watched as his leg flew up and away from the steps in an exaggerated slapstick version of slipping on a banana peel.

"Wallace!"

His eyes widened as they took in the sight of Andrew drifting back, his body falling into a block of moonlight that irradiated the horror on his face as he began to tilt.

Wallace was reminded of a time he fell down the steps at Andrew's house. He tumbled down the steps, bounced between the wall and the railing like a pinball before he rolled to the floor. He'd been in pain, but it was kind of funny and he and Andrew shared a good laugh afterwards. But this wasn't the same. Still yelling his name, Andrew fell back, his head was angled to connect first and hit the step with a solid thunk before his body crumbled into a ball and rolled over backwards. He bashed against the wall, the steps, and the railing before he toppled off the steps and sprawled onto the floor, his head smacking the tile like a rubber ball.

* * *

End of Chapter Two

* * *

 ** _AN:_** I'm so amazed at the interest this story got in readers and submissions off just the first chapter.I'm still taking in submissions and will keep the first chapter updated with which roles I'm looking to fill at any particular time (I'm still in need of a Kalos Champion).We had just one debut in this chapter, **Azalea** , who was submitted by **ChibiMuffehnz27.** I noticed a few other authors doing questions of the chapter and thought I'd give it a try and pose questions for you all to answer as a way to get feedback on certain events in the story, so...

 **Question of the Chapter #1: Do you think Wallace was right or wrong for trying to stop Andrew? Why?**

Would love to see your responses, also I'd appreciate feedback about chapter length. This chapter came in at about 6.5k words, would you prefer longer or shorter chapters (it won't affect update frequency)?


	3. He's Dead

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Three – He's Dead**

 _There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to.  
_ _One is always alone. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

 _ **SMACK!**_ The sound of Andrew slamming onto the floor reverberated through the foyer before it died into a low hum, like a room full of hands had clapped in concert. The sound of flesh and bone against glazed stone rumbled in the back of Wallace's mind. Even as time ticked away after the fall, it replayed in his mind, Andrew's unmanned face as he lost balance, the angle of his fall, the contorted form his body took as it hit each step, and finally his broken shape on the floor.

Wallace remained still on the steps, his eyes darting to something dark around Andrew's head. A halo of blood or the arc of a shadow? He couldn't bring himself to move to find out.

"Wallace, what did you do?"

Wallace craned his head to find his father at the top of the steps. His mouth opened to answer, but no words came, only airy sounds as his lips moved aimlessly. His head slowly turned until his eyes fell on Andrew and his breathing escalated to the point of his chest expanding and contracting rapidly. Sharp and heavy puffs of air shot from Wallace's mouth in the absence of words. He began to shake then, his hands jittered in his lap and even clutching his knees couldn't cease the tremors.

"No, oh no, no," Arlan said, making his way down the steps. He paused at the foot of the staircase and inched around Andrew before he moved to check his pulse. He kept a hand to his neck and his body slacked as he observed Andrew's position on the floor. "He's dead." Arlan looked up to his son with wide eyes. "Wallace, the police are on their way. I heard loud voices, I thought someone broke in so I called them. If they see him like this."

Each second Wallace stared down at Andrew it was like he was witnessing the scene for the first time and everything intensified. His blank eyes glossed over as the summer's night suddenly felt much colder and not even his trembling could keep him warm. Wallace shuddered as his heartbeat thumped away in his chest, the vibrations racking through his body and pulsating through the veins in his eyes.

Arlan raced back up the steps and stopped short to clamp his hands down on Wallace's shoulders. "Listen to me, Wallace! If the police get here and see him, dead, in our home, do you know what that means?" Arlan violently shook his son when he got no response. "Wallace! Answer me!"

Wallace allowed himself to be shaken like a rag doll, his head bouncing as if he lacked a neck bone. "It was an accident," Wallace whispered. "I didn't mean to kill her."

"Her?" Arlan asked, staring down into his son's eyes, partially covered by dirty blond hair.

"I didn't mean to kill him," Wallace said, his voice still barely audible.

"I know, I know you didn't. Accidents happen, son. You would never." Arlan said as he rubbed his hands up and down Wallace's arms. "But you can't be here when they get here, okay? I made the call, I have to talk to the police." Arlan grabbed Wallace under his arms and attempted to get him to stand, but Wallace could barely keep his legs under him long enough to stand on his own.

"Andrew," Wallace said. "Andrew?"

"I'll call his dad, tell him what happened, we'll figure this out. But I don't want the police involved until we talk to Charles. Until I talk to Charles. Wallace, you cannot be here for this." Arlan urged and pulled Wallace to his feet again, this time supporting him and walking back up the stairs. "Wallace, go!"

Wallace stumbled forward after his father pushed him away from the stairs and managed to stagger a few steps before he dove for the ground. He landed on his hands and knees before he slowly rose to his feet again, standing long enough to wobble into his bedroom.

"He's dead. Andrew's dead," Wallace muttered. "He's dead, because of me, I killed him. A killer. Murderer. I'm a murderer. No!" Wallace snapped his head to the right, glaring at something over his shoulder. "It was an accident! Accidents happen all the time, an accident. He fell, I didn't push him. I didn't help him. I killed him."

He stood unsteadily in the center of his room, his eyes falling on his computer where he watched Andrew's journey via PokéView. The closet they would use as base for hide and seek, the television and gaming consoles they spent hours playing on, the spot where they said their goodbyes nine years ago. The room spun around him as memories and the realization of what he'd done sunk in.

Without further thought Wallace launched into action. He first dove for his closet and yanked a large black duffel bag out from under a pile of shoes. Wallace ripped drawers out of his dresser and grabbed handfuls of whatever his eyes fell on before he shoved them into the bag. He swung the duffel on top of his dresser and gathered armfuls of whatever was there to stuff inside next. He whirled around, hands running frantically through his thick hair as he searched for what to take with him next, but the more he thought the less clear his mind became and the only thing he could think about was the time he was wasting.

He leapt towards his closet again and jammed his feet into the first pair of shoes he found. He tore several pieces of clothing off hangers and returned to his duffel, jamming them inside before he tugged the zipper closed over the now bulging bag.

Wallace slung the bag's strap over his chest just as lights of cool blue and searing red flashed through his window while sirens whooped at irregular intervals. Wallace watched in stillness as the lights intensified for a moment and then gradually dimmed.

He moved to the window and leaned out, attempting to get an idea of how high up he was. However high his bedroom was, the distance from his window to the ground looked jumpable. Wallace leaned back in and punched his duffel, maybe if he threw it down and landed on it it'd be just enough to cushion the fall. He looked back out the window and reminded himself it was stone below, and it was probably just enough to break his legs if he fell wrong.

His gaze shifted to the left and fell on a large green dumpster a few yards away from his window. With a black lid to keep the smell contained, the can probably stood as tall as him. Wallace slipped the strap of his duffel bag off and tossed it from the window. It hit the dumpster lid with a soft _**thud**_ and bounced off _ **,**_ watching it fall made him slightly nervous about making it to the can.

A series of low voices downstairs reinforced Wallace's decision. He climbed halfway out of the window and tightened his grip on the sill before he brought his other leg out. His body dropped instantly, but he pressed the tips of his shoes to the wall outside, slowly himself down. Car doors were shutting with force not far from him and he could hear gruff voices around his home.

The thought that someone might spot him as they patrolled the perimeter crossed his mind, but he quickly pushed it aside to focus on his distance from the dumpster. It looked even closer now and Wallace started to swing his body, left and right. Slowly at first, afraid a sudden movement would cause him to slip, he picked up speed, his body swinging closer to the dumpster at the swing's height.

Feeling his fingers go numb against the sill, Wallace swung harder and let his legs fly out before he let go. He thought the drop would happen instantly, but at first there was nothing but empty air. He shifted his body weight, putting his upper body first, just in time to hit the edge of the dumpster. The impact was a giant blow to the gut and his legs swung down after, slamming against the sides.

Without anything to grab onto but slick plastic, Wallace slid off the dumpster and fell to the alley. While the pain throbbed and radiated through him, Wallace struggled to his feet and retrieved his bag. He hobbled to the end of the alley as the pain subsided and peered around the corner to find his street filled with officers.

Three squad cars were parked outside his front door with numerous officers standing around. As he eyed the avenue he realized it had never looked so wide. Closed businesses and other homes lined the street with stone walkways and greenery partitioning them. Before Wallace had a chance to come up with a plan on getting past the officers, he was lit up from behind.

"Hey, you!"

Wallace turned and was blinded by a light, beyond it he could barely make out a figure coming towards him. As with most of his decisions lately, Wallace took off in a full sprint without thinking.

There were noises behind him before a light lit up with the alley and the clip-clop of hooves echoed on stone. Wallace darted out into the avenue, catching the eye of the officers who'd been alerted by the shouting, and peered over his should to see an officer mounting a large steed cloaked in cerise flames.

"Stop him!"

Wallace turned and sprinted across the avenue, the officer in pursuit charged after him, rocketing across the avenue at a dead gallop. Once on the other side Wallace darted into another small alley and easily maneuvered its short curves and turns even in the low light. He glanced back just once, but couldn't see the glow of the pokémon's mane, figuring it wasn't able to keep its speed in a narrow alley. He continued to make his way through the alleyway maze, following a map from memory on how to make it to the other side. He thought about slowing to better navigate the alleys and avoid hitting a dead end, but although he couldn't see the officers chasing him, he could still hear them in the distance.

He never traveled Lumiose at night and now, on the run from police, he felt more isolated in his city than ever. He never ventured outside his home much other than for business meetings his father dragged him to, and he didn't know too many people in the city. There was a small list of people he could turn to, but no one close enough to understand his problem. As he ran around a long curve at the end of an alley, a thought occurred to him.

He was alone. Even at a late hour the city was alive, music and voices could be heard through the walls and vendors were still working on the boulevard, but none of it could comfort him. The sun had abandoned its post in the sky long ago and vanished below the skyline, off to brighten someone else's day. The moon was no where in sight and the stars, as usual, were overshadowed by the lights of Lumiose. The city's landmark shone the brightest and lent its ashen light to a young man as he sprinted through the city's dank alleyways. Stone, licked wet by rainfall, squelched under his shoes as he pumped his legs harder, the sounds of barking, squealing tires, and sirens all urging him to run faster.

A headlight flashed across the wall above him just as he darted out into a plaza. The moment he stopped moving the exhaustion took over. He hunched over, hands on his knees, as his lungs cried out for air. He raised his head in search of a place to hide and found nothing but an obelisk in the center of the plaza's field.

"Water." His head bobbed side to side, trying to focus in on the bubbling sound of running water.

His leg muscles throbbed in protest as he ran across the plaza and around a short curve into an avenue. He stopped in the middle of a stone bridge that connected the halves of the residential avenue, and turned to face the tower. While the waters leading to Lumiose's sewers churned under him he weighed his options, would Clemont be of any help or would hiding there make this into a bigger mess?

Before he had time to give it any further thought, a pair of lights emerged from around the corner leading to another plaza. He recoiled from the beams and moved to turn back when another set of lights emerged, blocking his path.

Panic filled him as he raised his arms to block the lights. He took a cautious step back, but froze hearing the unmistakeable sound of a Poké Ball being opened. He threw a glance over his shoulder in time to see a vibrant red beam shatter the darkness and form into a fiendish figure he couldn't quite recognize.

"Put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees!"

He flinched at the sound of a man's voice, magnified by a speaker, and nearly complied out of instinct, but his fear kept him frozen in place.

The four figures around him slowly tightened and more Poké Balls were launched and more pokémon, of varying shapes and sizes, joined his pursuers along the edge of the avenue. A Poké Ball breaking open on the pavement just a few yards from him made him shudder and think to take off running, but he realized they had blocked him from escaping.

"Vileplume, use sleep powder."

Over the sound of his ragged breathing he heard a soft **_pop_ ** in the air and what felt like snow began to dust his arms. Although he had no where to go he backed up to the edge of the bridge and brought his arm across his nose.

"Wartortle, water gun!"

He whipped around to his left just in time for the gush of water to hit him, legs first. He moaned as the impact knocked him off balance, the rubber of his shoes slipped on the wet stone and he toppled over. His chest smacked the bridge before the stream of water pushed him over the edge to the icy black water below.

Panic flooded his mind and before he could manage to get his feet under him he hit the water at a slant. A shotgun blast of pain exploded through his right ankle, and his chest, still throbbing from the fall, hit the water like a cannonball. His sight vanished as he sunk and the water snaked into his nose and gagged him, trying desperately to fill his lungs.

He struggled to breach the surface as his throat tied itself into a knot. Voices ripped through the roar and slush of the water while his veins thundered with pumping blood as his body craved air. He flailed in the water, trying to find the surface, but everything was dark and cold, up was right and down was left; everything a maze of confusion.

He whirled around, the sound of pokémon moving in the water around him suddenly became as frightening as the thought that he might drown. While he struggled to right himself the water pushed and pulled him, to where he didn't know until he was slammed against a row of metal bars.

He coughed out the last of his air as his head broke the surface. He sputtered as a pair of glowing eyes attached to a serpentine body fell on him further down the canal. "Please," he cried. He stopped resisting the water and let it push him back when he noticed his arm and shoulder slipped through a gap. He turned himself over, going with the current that pressed him harder against the bars and realized there was a sizable gap.

Angling his body and using the push of the water he attempted to squeeze through the bars. Thin as he was, he sucked in his stomach and pushed himself as hard as he could to fit. The cold metal bars might as well have been mountains threatening to break his ribs as he pushed harder.

A cry of desperation flew out from between his lips as he recalled a distant memory from his childhood. He'd dropped a ball behind his mother's dresser and was able to reach it, but not by pulling it out from the side. Rather than find another way to retrieve it, he continued to tug and pull the ball out and realized that by twisting and turning it the ball somehow came lose.

Imagining himself as simply stuck between two things, rather than trapped in a life or death situation, he twisted his body the best he could while tilting forward. To his surprise the bar against his chest shifted down against his ribs and he felt the pressure ease as his lower body slipped through.

Despite his best efforts to remain above water, beyond the bars the canal opened wider and deeper, causing the water to move at an alarming speed and it quickly dragged him back under into the darkness.

Wallace managed to get in one pitiable breath of air before the water pulled him under, but his body still craving oxygen ate it up instantly. Panic burned in his chest, completely under the black water he lost all sense of direction again. The current pulled at his duffel, now soaked through and working in tandem with the water to drown him.

His head struck something, stone perhaps, a blow that sent pain through his body like an electrical shock that numbed his limbs. He tried to right himself and go with the flow, but against the current every move he made was convulsive and weak. Nearly out of air his throat dilated, searching for air that simply didn't exist. The band of his duffel bag cut into his chest as his oxygen-hungry heart pounded increasingly fast, a fist on his caging ribs.

A sudden lurch forward, an increase in the water's speed, and he slammed against a pair of bars. Everything was black, but his spastic fingers groped around his chest until they found the strap and traced along it. His bag had already gone through the bars and was pulling on him like a child tugging along a parent.

Straining against the current, Wallace turned and attempted the same trick to squeeze through the bars. He tilted his body forward and back and managed to get his upper chest through, but the hard part was getting over his ribs. The bag's strap was thick and laying across his chest it added just padding to make twisting through the gap nearly impossible. He struggled to move the strap up to his neck, it hadn't been a problem before, and as he adjusted the strap up the water tugged at the bag and the strap sawed his throat.

Wallace twisted and turned, forcing his body through as his throat made low popping noises and his chest became a starburst of pain after the pressure of the bars. Beyond the bars was much like the last stretch of canal, the water was faster and more vicious than before.

The last air he held in his lungs bubbled from his lips and he tumbled in the water. His mind darkened and detached from its body of pain, up and away to the star's playground where he watched himself: a slave to the current, a puppet cut from its strings, an heir tumbling through his city's sewer system.

From his detached plane he started to drift to a farther place when his body smashed through the water, surfacing like a clumsy whale. His mind was far away, but his body, aching for air, snapped its mouth open and sucked in one giant lungful before his duffel tugged him down again.

As his consciousness drifted back into place a distant memory hit him: _Hang on, baby. Hang on!_ His mother's voice cut through the slush of water and brought light to the void. Without warning, or expectation, his body cut through the water again and gulped down another mouthful of air. The throbbing pain of deprivation eased and his mind began to function again, sewing itself back into place, but he couldn't count for a random breath of air if he was going to survive. Although he'd probably spent less than a few minutes in the water his clothes and shoes were waterlogged and felt like chains wrapping around him, all connected to his anchor.

He made a jerk upwards to try for air. He found it, but his breath was cut short as his forehead connected with stone above. The impact sent him reeling back and he gagged on the dank water around him. He sputtered, wasting precious air in the process, while his anchor sank and took him down with it. But the water's current moved differently, flowing slowly down and out.

Wallace dared to open his eyes and through the gunk and moisture on his lashes he caught sight of the moon and sucked in fresh air before he sank into the water again. The current was gentle here and although his anchor was sinking, whatever water he'd landed in wasn't deep enough to drown him.

A cry of relief came from his lips as he felt the tension and pain fade from his body. Exhaustion took over and he let himself float, aimlessly, while he fantasized about the moon casting its glow on him.

* * *

Wallace shot up, cold water stung in his nostrils and matted hair against his forehead. He hunched over and coughed water from his mouth, pinching and then blowing air out of his nose. There was movement at his side and Wallace wiped water from his eyes before he noticed a small creature standing there.

It looked like an oversized lizard, bland in color with a oblong head and large eyes blinking at him. Upon being noticed, the creature let out a frightened gasp, but rather than run away its skin began to change. Patches at a time blended with the surroundings until it became see through and Wallace found himself looking at the room where it once stood.

His eyes fell to a jagged red stripe that floated in mid-air before he reached for it. The creature instantly appeared in the same spot, its skin returning to his base color slowly before it ran away. It didn't make it very far, while looking back to Wallace, it failed to notice a closed door and ran into it at full speed.

A wooden bucket clattered to the floor beside Wallace, causing him to jolt forward and throw a look over his shoulder. Another creature stood there, much taller than the previous, hovered over Wallace with dark paws covering its mouth as it let out a sinister sounding laugh.

Startled and shivering, Wallace gripped the material under him as he scanned his surroundings. He was laying on a pile of blankets on the floor of a sparsely decorated room. A small kitchen sat in one corner and led off into a series of shelves and a small entertainment system along the same wall. The only other furniture in the room was a large wooden table with a few stools pushed in around it.

The dark creature crouched down beside Wallace who backed up further from it. Its entire body was covered in dark fur and a wild tuff of red hair fell down its back. Wallace couldn't help but eye its sharp red claws before they locked gazes.

Wallace scanned the room for a weapon when the only door in the room opened. The door scooted aside the fallen creature and a woman's head peered through the gap, looking down at what the door was stuck on. "Marston, what are you doing down there?" she asked.

Wallace watched carefully as she stepped inside, she was of average height dressed in workout clothes, a tank top, shorts, and tennis shoes. Her skin was unnaturally dark, evidenced by a series of tan lines he spotted on her thighs and shoulders. Dripping with sweat, her riotous hair was wooden brown and stopped below her jawline.

"I don't know why I asked, not like he can tell me." The woman scooped up the fallen creature and carried him to the table where she laid him down before she turned her attention to Wallace. "Finally up, huh?" she asked as she placed her hands on her hips and her eyes seemed to size him up.

Wallace ran his eyes down her body from head to toe. Her age was impossible to figure out, she looked mature, but at the same time youthful and her body was well-defined, running from her would probably not work out in his favor. He looked to the door she came through, other than a window, it was the only way out and there was still the fox-looking beast beside him. Wallace peered at the creature beside him who was still watching him.

"You don't have to run, we're not dangerous."

Wallace froze and brought his eyes back to the woman. Without realizing it he'd gotten his legs under him, now in a crouched position, ready to take off. His next thought was the bucket. Wallace's eyes darted to the fallen wooden bucket and thought about smashing it and using one of the pieces as a weapon.

"Corbett," the woman said. She locked eyes with the creature beside Wallace and nodded to the bucket.

Corbett squinted at Wallace before it stretched its hind leg out and kicked the bucket away.

The woman stepped on the bucket and rolled it under her foot. "Now that you're not thinking about gutting me or my pokémon, how about we start with names? I'm Antoinette DelaRosa." Antoinette stepped forward to Wallace and held out her hand.

Wallace's eyes fell to her hand without any thought to shake it in return. "Where am I?"

"A house, somebody's house, I don't know." Antoinette looked around the walls and up to the ceiling as if she were seeing it for the first time. "I kind of got stuck with this place and I don't know what I'm going to do about it."

"I can see it's a house, but _where_ am I?" Wallace asked, gripping fistfuls of the blankets.

"Just off Route 7," Antoinette said. "Berry Fields."

After finally getting the answer he wanted Wallace released his grip. "Berry Fields," he repeated. "Route 7, that's near Parfum Palace, right?"

"Yeah," Antoinette said. She moved back to the table and pulled out one of the chairs for herself.

"How did I get here?" he asked.

"I brought you here," Antoinette said. "Well actually my friend Philo did. We were fishing on the bridge and I hooked you. I thought it was my lucky day that I'd caught something massive, but it was you." Antoinette paused and her eyes went wide. "Not that I'm trying to say you're massive or fat or anything! I don't think you're fat, sorry."

"You fished me out of the water?" Wallace asked.

"Yeah, and you try and repay me by running away or with violence." Antoinette laughed and nudged the bucket with her foot. "No I didn't get you out actually, Philo did. You should thank him when you get the chance." Antoinette turned and looked behind her on the table, beyond Marston. "I got your bag out of the water, but most of the stuff was soaked. The papers inside are here, the clothes and stuff are outside, but I'm sure they're dry by now."

"Your friend pulled me out of the river?" Wallace asked. "Wasn't it dangerous, he could have been swept away with me."

Antoinette closed her eyes and chuckled. "Philo can handle himself in the water."

Wallace eyed her curiously before he got to his feet, but it didn't last long as he wobbled and stumbled backwards until he fell into Corbett's arms.

"Nice one, Corbett," Antoinette said and gave him a thumbs up. "Maybe go slow? You've been asleep for a while."

Wallace looked to Corbett and slowly lowered himself to the ground. "Thank you, Corbett."

Corbett's face curled up into what Wallace guessed was a smile. "Zor!" he cried.

"How long?" Wallace asked as he pressed the heel of his palm to his temple, suddenly feeling very lightheaded.

"Two days, Philo got you out on Saturday." Antoinette counted the days on her fingers. "You've been asleep since then, I wonder if you had a concussion or something."

"I thought sleeping was bad if you have a concussion." Wallace said.

"Well it looks like you had different idea about how to handle your concussion." Antoinette laughed and hopped up to walk to the window.

"Wait, you said two days?" Wallace's jaw dropped at that, he must have fallen into the sewer early Saturday morning and floated out of the city's limits. He gripped at his head, try as hard as he might he couldn't recall any memories after hitting the water, maybe he had hit his head at some point and blacked out in the water. Wallace looked to Antoinette who was looking out the window while the sun illuminated her features.

"So, what were you doing in the water anyway?" Antoinette gave whatever lied outside the window another look before she turned back to Wallace.

Wallace averted his eyes and ended up looking to Corbett who stared back blankly.

"Well, what about your name?" Antoinette asked. "If you don't feel like sharing why you were in the river, could you at least tell me your name?"

Wallace bit down on his tongue, Antoinette seemed nice, if not mischievous, judging by how her pokémon acted. But even with that in their favor Wallace didn't feel like sharing anything about himself, not until he knew more about what happened in the past two days. "Do you know how far we are from Lumiose City?"

His deflection seemed to cause a change in Antoinette, the playful smirk vanished from her face and her features softened. "A couple of hours on foot," she said. "But I don't think now's a good time to head there."

"Why not?" Wallace asked, trying to keep his tone flat, to prevent letting on anything.

"I'll show you, it's probably still on." Antoinette moved past Wallace, who stepped far out of way, to reach the television. She turned on the system and instantly a news report began playing on screen. "They've been running the same story all weekend."

Wallace moved closer to the television as the screen showed a panned out view of Lumiose Tower. As the image continued to pan an older woman dressed in a striking red dress came into focus. She brought a microphone up to her mouth before she began speaking into the camera. "The citizens of Lumiose City have been on edge all weekend. On Saturday we brought you news of a possible invasion at the home of Pearce Productions CEO and founder, Arlan Pearce. Pearce spoke to police stating that after he returned home from an event Friday night he went to sleep and was awoken hours later by a voice and loud noises in his home, it was then he called police. Officers arrived and noticed a figure fleeing from the scene and immediately gave chase. The Pearce home did not show signs of breaking and entering, but Pearce did say the room belonging to his son, Wallace Pearce, had been ransacked."

At the mention of his name Wallace tensed, expecting his photo to pop up on screen at any moment. While he remained ready to bolt as soon as it did, his picture never came up and the story continued on.

"Officers were in pursuit of the individual spotted running from the home Saturday around 5 a.m., but lost sight of them here, east of Centrico Plaza." The reporter turned and gestured back to the Tower and to the avenue she stood on. "Police say they once they managed to corner the individual they escaped into the sewer system beneath the city. Lumiose officials have sent out search teams, but have yet to find anyone. Security barriers and checkpoints have been set up along the exits to the city to verify all looking to enter and exit the city as the search continues. According to witnesses and an estimate made by the police, the individual they are looking for stands around 5'8'' with a slim build and dark blond hair. But Lumiose's troubles don't stop there as just this morning business partner to Arlan Pearce, Charles Gates, filed a missing person's report with the Lumiose Police for his son, Andrew Gates."

Wallace's felt his chest tighten as a picture of Andrew appeared on screen. He couldn't be sure when the picture was taken, sometime before his return to Kalos he'd imagine. Andrew looked the same, same winning smile and golden blond hair, but he stood on a long red drawbridge Wallace wasn't familiar with.

"Andrew Gates was last seen leaving his birthday party, held by Arlan Pearce at Parfum Palace, on Friday. If you have any information to aid the police in these matters do not hesitate to call the number at the bottom of your screen."

Wallace watched as Antoinette turned down the volume on the television and the reporter signed off and another took her place on screen in front of local business.

"Crazy, huh?" Antoinette asked.

Wallace nodded, his throat too dry to speak and feeling like he just swallowed a cactus. He slowly backed up from the table and moved to the door. "Outside," he managed to wheeze out as he fumbled for the door handle.

He pushed his way outside into the blinding sunlight that shone down on him. Wallace brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the harsh sunshine and observed the area. The field was surrounded by a high stone wall that separated it from the whatever lie beyond. Shrubs and potted plants basked in the shadow under the stone wall. Everywhere he looked Wallace found a row of tilled soil that had nourished a seed into a lush tree. Many of them had blooming flowers that swayed in the summer's breeze, but some were decorated with vibrant berries, the shapes and colors of which Wallace had never seen before.

Wallace wandered off, walking along the planted rows of berry trees, a thoughtless task that allowed his mind to work his thoughts like a boomerang, sending him off thinking about one possibility which left him conjuring numerous _what if_ _s_ , before he came spiraling back to the base truth, that Andrew was dead and the police didn't know it, yet.

According to the report, Charles had been the one to declare Andrew missing, but his own father planned to call Charles and explain everything to him. Wallace pressed the heels of his palms against his temples before he held them against his eyes until his vision became red and blotchy. Could the police have gotten there before his dad had a chance to make the call? If so, why hadn't they noticed Andrew's body? What had his dad done to Andrew when he left?

As he passed a tree with two kinds of berries on it, each with dozens ready to be plucked, something caused him to stop in his tracks. There was a sound, something unfit for his surroundings. He'd heard it only briefly before it vanished into the sound of the wind moving the trees.

Wallace listened, but could only make out the sounds of nature around him. Water running in the distance and tree branches scratching each other all around him. Dismissing the odd sound as part of his paranoid imagination, he continued walking. There was nothing ominous about the wind and jumping at every sound around him wouldn't help anything.

He didn't make it far when he realized something was still bothering him, a feeling he couldn't shake. The eerie, unsettling feeling that comes from believing you're not alone, the feeling of unseen eyes watching his every move. Wallace whipped around to his backside. His anxiety was like a rocket that had just taken off and was about to shoot through the atmosphere, but fizzled into a nosedive once he saw only trees and soil behind him.

But he wasn't satisfied. What if there was something in the field with him? Wallace scanned the area, waiting to pick out the slightest of movements between the trees, for a shadow to move across the window, or for Antoinette to step outside.

Instead of making a break for the house he kept his ground and stared down the trees. "If someone's out here just come out. This isn't funny!" he shouted. "Philo?"

To his surprise there was a response, not what he expected – like a voice or a person coming shirking out from behind a tree with the satisfaction of scaring him spread across their face—but a soft tapping, padding, on the ground came from the far end of the field.

Wallace walked towards it, to the center of the field where the tilled rows were split in half and a dirt walkway led to the back of the field. The closer he got the more panicked he became, not out of fear for what it might be, but because of a change in the air. The warm and inviting air filled with a sizzling, prickling intensity that reminded him of the moment before someone snuck up on him in dead silence. It was the feeling of being in the same room with a muted television, something was there, but it wasn't registering on all his senses.

As he rounded the end of the tree line he expected to find Philo, whoever he was, crouched there. Or maybe nothing at all, that his mind really was playing tricks on him. So a giant pokémon was kind of a surprise.

It was lean but muscular, with a red body with accents of gold, tan and grey. Large feathers surrounded its chest and head and fell down its back. It stood nearly half a foot taller than him, its blue eyes boring deep into him. "An-Antoinette!" He didn't dare turn his back on it, as it flexed its muscles and its talon-like hands began clench, but he raised his voice as loud as he could. "Antoinette, help!"

He heard the door to the house open and Antoinette's voice before the pokémon in front of him lowered on its legs and pounced. He moved to run, but his feet tangled over each other and he fell back onto the soil. The pokémon, proving itself far more agile than him, landed with its legs above his shoulders. It lifted one foot and placed it squarely on Wallace's chest and he watched as it began to flex and show off the muscles in its arms, as if it had just conquered him.

"What?" Wallace asked before a red beam struck the pokémon's side. It froze before the red light enveloped its body and it vanished from atop him.

Wallace remained still, even after it was gone, until Antoinette appeared at his side, hands outstretched. He took them both and she hoisted him off the ground like he was a pillow. Even after he was standing Antoinette didn't release his hands, instead she tightened her grip and vigorously shook them.

"Finally got that handshake!" Antoinette said, beaming.

Too shaken up to care, Wallace let Antoinette shake his hands, his arms flailing up and down limply. "What was that thing?"

Antoinette raised her brows curiously. "I'm getting the impression you've never seen pokémon before."

"I have, I have," Wallace said. "I've seen them, just not many of them and never up close like that before. Only through a computer screen really." He placed a hand over his heart and tried to steady its beating.

The corner of Antoinette's mouth curled up into a wicked smirk. "Through a computer, huh?" she asked as she leaned in closer to Wallace. "Are you the type of person that enjoys watching or reading about pokémon and human relationships?"

"Relationships?" Wallace asked, easing away from Antoinette.

"Re-la-tion-ships." Antoinette said again with emphasis, her eyebrows wiggling and eyes shining mischievously.

Wallace flushed and jolted back from the woman. "Wh-What? No! Of course not! I've only seen them through PokéView, that's what I meant!"

Antoinette grinned and looked over her shoulder to Corbett who was chuckling into his paws. "I'm just messing with you. Well, it looks like I just saved your life." Antoinette stuck her hands on her hips and gave Wallace a toothy grin. "Again."

Wallace kept a hand on his chest, but rather than tracking his heartbeat he moved to massaging along his collar bone. The world was full of pokémon, something he knew from watching Andrew's journey, and it seemed like he couldn't survive without having pokémon of his own. "Antoinette, where's the nearest PC? They usually have them in Pokémon Centers, right?"

Antoinette's grin fell into a frown and she gave Wallace an exasperated look. "Yeah, there's one inside every Pokémon Center, but there's a day-care not far from here, they've got one. But Camprier Town isn't too far either.

"I can walk to Camprier?" Wallace asked, turning to the opening in the field's property.

"Yeah, but maybe you should hold off on the trip." Antoinette said. "Remember, you've been out for a few days and still haven't eaten anything. I don't mean to get in your business, but when I pulled you from the water you didn't have any Poké Balls on you and there weren't any in your bag. Judging by how you reacted to Marston, Corbett, and Wyn I'm sure you're not a trainer."

"Wyn?" Wallace asked.

"Wyn is my blaziken." Antoinette spun Wyn's Poké Ball around on her index finger.

Wallace didn't answer, instead he kept his eyes on the exit of the field and let his thoughts wander as to what might be out there. He watched Andrew's stream of Kalos religiously, but that was the very first of his journey and it was hard to remember what exactly Andrew had been through.

"Look," Antoinette said, interrupting Wallace's thoughts. "I know is a lot to take in, considering I'm just a stranger, but I don't really want your thanks for saving you, it's what I do. What I like to do. I like helping others, especially kids like you who seem a little lost in the world. I don't want to bring it up, but if you hadn't been pulled from the water you could have drifted to the ocean where you definitely wouldn't have survived. I won't make you stay here, but I think you should accept my help and think about what's best for you."

Wallace watched as Antoinette's demeanor seemed to change again, all of a sudden she seemed older and more motherly. "I do appreciate it, your help. Philo, whoever he is, did save my life by pulling me out of the water and I want to thank him. You didn't have to bring me here, but you did and I'm thankful, I really am. But it's better for you if I leave, you know little to nothing about me, and you forget meeting me when I'm gone."

Antoinette looked troubled at the idea, but her expression slowly softened. "Can you just stay one more night? I'll feed you, pack up your stuff, and then you can leave. No questions asked, okay?"

"No questions asked." Wallace said, sticking his hand out for another shake, a real one.

Antoinette grinned and folded her arms behind her head as she walked off, leaving Wallace hanging.

* * *

End of Chapter Three

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ And now we have the connection back to our prologue! Again, thank you everyone for the love the story is getting. I really appreciate it considering I haven't gotten to the university yet, but I'm glad you're enjoying the slow burn. Character submission is still open, check the first chapter for details. Like last time, we had just one character debut: **Antoinette DelaRosa** was submitted by **snowwolf12132**.

I got some good answers for the last question, most of you saw it both ways, which I kind of expected.

 **Question of the Chapter #2:** How do you feel about Wallace running away? Should he have stayed to face the consequences?


	4. A Second Chance

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Four – A Second Chance**

 _Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

It was hours before dawn and Wallace was weary from a night of broken sleep. He'd been unconscious for the first two nights he spent at the Berry Field's house, and sleeping there voluntarily proved to be a problem. It was a medley of things: the eerie silence alien to a city-boy mixed with the tumult of wild pokémon outside and his haunting dreams, dreams that involved stairs, sirens, and the slush of water that kept him waking up through the night.

Last night, shortly after Antoinette had fallen asleep Wallace muted the television and tuned into the last news report for the evening. It was much like the other reports, stating that there were no new leads in either of the cases that were turning into Lumiose City's top priorities. The troubling thought of why no one had found Andrew's body had Wallace gathering up his duffel bag and leaving the house in the middle of the night, despite assuring Antoinette he would wait to leave until the morning.

Wallace's feet throbbed in pain with every step he took down the beaten path of Route 7. The shoes he threw on before leaving his house turned out to be a pair of old dress shoes that were too small for his wide feet. With each step his toes were being rubbed raw against the inner lining and to make matters worse, it wasn't a short walk.

The trip to Camphrier Town was long, perhaps a good hour on foot, but like Antoinette promised it was also free of pokémon. Though that did little to lighten Wallace's mood with only the moon's light to guide him. Trees and bushes surrounded him off the path and every rustle, whether it be from the wind or something sentient, had Wallace hobbling faster down the trail. The path, made from decades of foot traffic, only diverged once into another track, one that led to Parfum Palace. As he passed Wallace saw the castle's lights twinkling far in the distance, the memory of that place and night seeming just as far away.

Once he entered Camphrier, despite not knowing anyone, it was a mixture of his own fear and anxiety that had him practically sprinting to the Pokémon Center. Keeping his head down proved to be the best way to avoid any potential instances of eye contact.

Despite the late hour, the town was surprisingly busy and paranoia told him anyone staring too long or getting too close, like the elderly woman who only wanted to wish him safe travels, would reveal themselves to be police and haul him back to Lumiose. He had to remind himself that the only time his name was mentioned on the news was when they reported on ht alleged break-in at his house. Which, when compared to Andrew's missing person case, was turning out not to be a big deal after all.

His gnawing panic aside, Wallace made it to Camphrier's Pokémon Center without incident. Having never gone inside another city's Pokémon Center, it was surreal as he stepped inside, how similar it looked compared to the ones back home. But the initial shock soon passed once he started to pick out the differences.

Although the interiors were the same, the trainers and shoppers might as well have been from an entirely different world. Children with grass stains on what looked to be already worn tennis shoes hopped in and out of line to speak with the pink haired attendant. A bored looking man stood leisurely behind a blue desk to his right and ragged looking trainers lounged around the room on cheap plastic chairs and lopsided tables. Off to his left a group of girls were dipping out a changing room and giggling insanely. It was a jarring change from the affluent trainers who often visited the plush Pokémon Center's in Lumiose.

Wallace quickly moved away from the doors and found a seat in a tattered black couch that curved along two walls. A small flatscreen hung on the adjacent wall and a round man dressed in hiking gear flipped aimlessly through the channels. Wallace was placing his duffel on the table, happy to get the strap off his shoulder, when the television caught his attention.

"–bring you an update on the case of Andrew Gates."

Heat bloomed in Wallace's forehead as the report started. He peered up at the television out of the corner of his eye, but kept his hands busy, rummaging around his bag.

"Andrew Gates was last thought to have been seen at Parfum Palace on Friday, but security tapes from a Pokémon Center here on the Southern Boulevard of Lumiose City show Andrew stopping inside just after 1 a.m. Police are now refocusing their search in an effort to locate Andrew. In connection with his disappearance, on Friday, Arlan Pearce made a call to the police stating someone had broken into his home. Witnesses near the Pearce townhouse described a young man fleeing from police at the scene and have given statements to police regarding what they saw that night. While some witnesses believe this individual to _be_ Andrew Gates, police found no evidence supporting that claim and instead believe this unknown person to be behind both the break-in at the Pearce residence and the disappearance of Andrew Gates. We'll keep you updated as this story unfolds."

Wallace watched as the channel changed to another news station that was delivering the same report. Not wanting to hear it again, Wallace snatched up his bag and darted around the corner of the wall that held the television. On the other side, aside from a dressing room, were wall shelves filled with various books, and a wall of landline phones.

The line of phones caught Wallace's eye, free to use and anonymous, he could make any call from here without concern. He dropped his bag to the ground and pulled the phone between his ear and shoulder before he dialed in his home number.

When his father didn't pick up immediately, Wallace reminded himself that it was late and that his father was probably well into is pill-induced sleep. As he moved to drop the phone back onto the base his father's groggy voice came through the line. "Hello? This is Arlan Peace."

He listened to his father clear his throat and considered hanging up anyway, suddenly unsure of what to say. He kept the phone to his ear, breathing shallowly, as his father continued to talk. His eyes were trained on the phone base when he finally spoke up. "What's happening?" he blurted out, eyes squeezed shut.

"What? Who is this? How did you get this number– Wait, Wallace? Wallace, is that you? Wallace, why are you calling me? Where are you?"

Wallace glanced up, the hiker was still flipping through the channels and everyone else in the Pokémon Center was focused on healing their pokémon or shopping. "I'm not far," he said. "The news is saying Andrew's missing."

"Yes, I talked to Charles," Arlan sighed through the line. "He said the last time he saw him was at the party. He wasn't been able to reach him so filed a report."

"That's not what I mean," Wallace said through gritted teeth. Of course he won't be able to reach him, he thought. "Why are they saying he's missing? Don't they know?" He couldn't bring himself to say the actual words.

"He's missing because I moved his body."

His father's cold and precise tone chilled the burning panic the news report started in him. "What did you do?" he asked, his voice and hands quivering.

"What I had to," Arlan said bluntly. "Wallace, focus. If Charles thinks Andrew left because he didn't want to accept my job offer, you're in the clear. Come home and we'll make a statement. We'll say after I sent you to find him he told you about a plan to travel back to a different region. I think I heard him once say Kanto was his favorite, which is perfect. It's far from us."

Kalos was his favorite, Wallace thought. As much as Andrew enjoyed traveling there was no where else he wanted to be than home. "Where is he?" Wallace asked.

"Don't worry about it," Arlan said. "I've taken care of everything, all you need to do is come home."

Wallace's entire body tensed at his father's easy dismal and he clenched the phone so tightly the plastic creaked in his fist. "Where is he?!" Wallace asked.

"Wallace! Don't raise your voice to me! Remember, I've been cleaning up _your_ mess for the last few days!" Arlan barked through the line. "You're not going to want to hear what I did with him. He's dead, okay? That's all you need to focus on. Nothing you do will change the fact that he's not coming back. What happened after you left doesn't matter. What happened to Andrew was an accident, you don't need to blame yourself. You and I, we're the only ones who know what really happened. If we agree to follow Charles' disappearance theory we can say he left Kalos and this will all be over. No one has to know."

"No one has to know." Wallace repeated. He rolled the words around in his mind, he could return to Lumiose and pick up where he left off. The tragedy of Andrew Gates would remain a secret and he would live on. But who said he deserved to? Why was he able to return home and live on as if nothing had happened while Andrew's body was hidden away somewhere. A slow rotting reminder of his guilt. Suddenly, the idea of returning home made his stomach churn. Could he face Charles and lie to his face, his father had done it, but could he do it? Tell the father of his best friend that Andrew suddenly decided to travel again. Months would pass and Charles would expect letters or phone calls, something, but they would never come.

Nothing would ever come for Andrew again. The local celebrity with a promising future would never have a chance to realize his potential and live his life. But somehow, Wallace could return home and live his. On the verge of tears, Wallace pressed the phone to his forehead and gritted his teeth. "This isn't happening," he said.

"Come home son, just come home." Arlan said, his tone a bit kinder. "Tell me where you are."

"Camphier," Wallace said with a whine.

Arlan sighed again. "Should I send someone to get you in the morning?"

"No, I'll come home," Wallace said quickly. "I'll find a way."

"Okay, I hope to see you tomorrow." Arlan said.

Wallace held onto the phone until he heard the call end before he put it back on the base. He bit and pulled at the skin on his lips until he felt a deep tear spread across his lower lip and the taste of blood reached his tongue. An idea hit him then and he grabbed his bag and moved out into the main floor and around to the Storage machine, thankful he didn't have to wait in a line.

He dropped his duffel at his bag and angled his body. Wallace made sure to keep his back to the line of trainers waiting to get their pokémon healed as he booted up the machine. Instantly the black screen came to life with a prompt asking for his identification as a card reader slot lit up.

Rather than waste time getting his trainer ID out, Wallace tamped down a combination of keys that opened a manual log-in box. His hands hovered over the keyboard as he thought about the trainer ID he wanted to enter. Antoinette had been right in her guess he wasn't a trainer, he'd never so much as caught a single pokémon, so there was no point in looking to his account for help.

Remembering Drew's ID wasn't the problem, in fact as soon as Drew had deposited a single pokémon nine years ago he sent word back to Lumiose and shared the number with Wallace. Every night before bed it was a ritual for Drew to call and for him to listen to Drew tell him about every pokémon he captured that day.

It was the thought of logging into his friend's account after his death that gave Wallace pause. But with a plan in mind, he pushed the thought aside, clamped his eyes shut, and punched in the ID. Reopening his eyes he was presented with several options for which personal computer he wanted to access. Though it felt almost like disturbing a grave, Wallace pushed through the feeling. "Cassius' PC." Wallace read, he'd never taken the time to find out who operated Kalos' Storage System before, something he was sure every trainer probably knew.

Wallace selected the first option and then clicked on WITHDRAW. He was greeted to a plain white box and pictures of bland colored pokémon, all categorized under the title Normal. Wallace let the corner of his lips rise into a smirk at Andrew's insistence on organizing his boxes based on type while he scrolled through an overview of the boxes. He paused on the box labeled Grass and highlighted each pokémon until he found one he recognized.

After a series of inputs the system's screen went through a short countdown before an electrical current circuited the machine's holding tray and deposited a pristine-looking Poké Ball. Wallace rubbed his thumb over the ruddy top before he experimentally tapped a button on the front. He was completely prepared for the chosen pokémon to emerge from the Poké Ball and trample him, but instead the Poké Ball shrunk to the size of a keychain trinket.

Wallace rolled the shrunken Poké Ball around in the palm of his hand before stuffing it down into his pocket. He swiftly logged out of Cassius' PC, but paused before shutting off the system. He toggled down to Drew's mail and, without further another about trampling on his friend's cyber grave, hit enter.

Andrew's inbox blossomed with multiple pages of mail. Bill, Professor Oak, Professor Elm, and Steven were a few of the names Wallace could recognize, but not say he ever met personally, though he was sure his father would know who each of them were. There were many other letters in the box, some from Drew's parents, a few recent ones from him, but majority were from a girl's name he didn't recognize, Lita.

Wallace logged out of Drew's account and the screen went back to the ID prompt screen where he entered his own ID. Rather than waste time checking his empty boxes he instantly went to his item storage and found a list valuable items all maxed out in their quantity. Though there was surely a fortune's worth of items there, Wallace decided to withdraw only a dozen big nuggets and a claim ticket for the items printed on the face of the machine.

"How much longer are you gonna be?"

Wallace nearly rocketed out of his skin at the voice beyond him. He craned his neck around to see a girl smacking on a wad of bubble gum waiting behind him with a few others standing beyond her, each looking more annoyed than the one in front.

"Sorry," Wallace replied. He whipped back around to the computer and mashed buttons until he had completely backed out of his item storage and the screen went black. He snatched up his bag and dipped away from the glares from the line he'd created and moved to the retail area where the worker snapped to attention at the sight of a customer.

"Welcome to the Poké Mart! How may I help you?"

"I'd like to sell." Wallace held out his claim ticket marked with the code for the withdrawn items.

The cashier looked over the slip of paper before scanning and frowning at his register. "I don't think I can fulfill this order," he said slowly. "I'd need my manager to come and handle it. He'll need to verify your ID and complete the order because its such a large amount.

Wallace wet his lips. He'd managed not to reveal his identity to Antoinette, even going as far as keeping his wallet on him in her presence in case she got too curious. He wasn't about to just hand his ID over to anyone now. "Could I just sell like two of them?" he asked, hopefully.

"Two? Sure!" The clerk's mood picked up and he quickly went to work punching in a command on his register. "Go ahead and swipe your ID."

Wallace opened his eyes wide at a small device in front of the register with a slot for swiping cards. "I can't get it in cash?" he asked, not wanting to leave a trail of his trainer ID being swiped. Punching it into a machine was risky enough, but swiping would leave a digital trail for sure. He mentally thanked his father for the lessons in how trainer IDs worked and were tracked.

The clerk grimaced and slowly shook his head. "No, I can't handle that much cash for a single transaction. Seriously, I can get my manager and he can take care of this for you. I'm sorry for being such a problem, but it's just our policy."

"No, that's fine. I'll just wait until I get home." Wallace stuffed the claim ticket into the back of his pants and grabbed his bag before he turned and sat at one of the nearby tables.

He placed his duffel on the tabletop and unzipped it, fishing around inside. He hadn't actually taken the time to figure out what he'd stuffed inside when he left home, but Antoinette had done a great job of folding and organizing his clothes, and everything else was combined nicely. Wallace grabbed a collection of papers, stiff and crumbled from being soaked and then dried, and skimmed through them. There seemed to be a bunch of useless junk there. Empty envelopes, scrap paper, a flyer, a letter, and tags for some clothes he'd bought recently.

Wallace balled most of it up to throw away, but ripped open the letter. The printing outside had been washed away, and as he unfolded the page inside most of the writing was illegible. "Dear Wallace—writing to you to—invitation to speak at—symposium. Radix University—business with Pearce Productions—ensure—students—best equipment and—an honor—speak with our students." Wallace read the smudged letter and strained his eyes to read the contact information at the bottom of the page, but couldn't make out a name or number.

His eyes flicked to a date of the page, the letter was written practically at the beginning of the summer. No doubt he'd missed the symposium date. He stuffed the letter back into his bag and gathered up his trash before he headed to the exit.

* * *

An hour later Wallace found himself at the entrance to Route 5, Versant Road, as a traveller in town called it. Wallace also learned it was supposed to be tricky to navigate because of its alternate routes.

Wallace enlarged the Poké Ball he withdrew and let it roll from his hand. It hit the ground with a soft thud before it cracked open, sending a searing light shooting from inside. The light struck the tall grass of the route before it formed a large pokémon on four legs with curved horns.

Wallace ventured out into the grass and ran a hang along its side. It was mostly brown with a mane of leaves that extended down its back. "So this is a gogoat," Wallace said. He'd seen Andrew catch a smaller looking version of one and evolve it into the pokémon that stood before him.

A stiff wind pushed in from the north and Wallace watched as the grass around them moved and the trees swayed. Without further thought he gingerly placed his hands on Gogoat's back and attempted to hoist himself up. It was awkward at first, mounting Gogoat. Although he and Andrew had to be around a similar weight, he was still scared to put all his weight on Gogoat. But despite his numerous attempts Gogoat stood firm and even seemed not to mind his numerous tries while it munched at the grass. On his first handful of attempts Wallace ended up falling back to the ground and once he rolled over Gogoat's back, conking his head on the ground.

Eventually Wallace managed to get onto the pokémon's back, a rather uncomfortable spot even with a saddle of leaves to cushion him. It took some coaxing, but after grabbing Gogoat's horns he managed to get it moving, trotting forward leisurely.

The going was slow, but Wallace felt relieved Gogoat was even listening to him at all and didn't want to press his luck. They passed through their first long patch of tall grass before Gogoat wandered through the route. He began to understand what the traveller meant by alternate paths. Ledges, twists, turns, a metal rail, and fields of flowers were all laid out before them. But Gogoat seemed smart enough to know what it was doing and took an incline up to tromp through a patch of purple flowers.

As they entered another stretch of tall grass something caused Gogoat to pause. There was a rustling in the grass before something akin to a frog croaking in a blender broke the silence. A moment later, Wallace spotted something—a blob, grayish green—scooting through the field, closing in on him and Gogoat.

Wallace eyed the blob carefully and heard himself swallow. Another blob moved out of the corner of his eye off to the right. He tossed it a quick glance, but found more than just one blob, there were two.

Gogoat had noticed the blobs too and began to back up, placing its hooves carefully everywhere it stepped. Wallace gripped its horns tightly as he watched the blobs, but no matter how far Gogoat backed up the blobs kept pushing in on them.

A sound, something like air hissing from a balloon, brought Wallace's attention to the first blob. The moon barely lit up the field, but Wallace could see a dark fog rising up from the ground. The sound continued, coming from the other blobs around him, and more dark haze drifted from the grass.

"Gogoat, run!" Wallace's command did nothing to edge Gogoat on so he kicked its haunch. "Run!"

Startled, Gogoat shied and then darted across the field, surging away with a mighty heave of its legs. Gasping, Wallace struggled to keep his grip on the horns. His sweaty palms slipped with every sudden movement Gogoat made in an attempt to flee.

With eyes on the blobs, still spewing their haze, Wallace gripped Gogoat's horns closer to its head and jerked it to the left. The blobs were forming a triangle in the grass and Wallace spotted an opening to get clear across the field.

"Go!" Wallace jabbed Gogoat with his heels, causing the animal to a frenzy. Wallace hunched down and tightened his thighs around the pokémon's middle, feeling its power jolt up his spine with every pounding step. When Gogoat suddenly stopped, Wallace lurched forward, smacking his head against the back of Gogoat's.

He shifted up and peered over its head to find two more blobs in the grass before them, thick clouds gathering above them. Gogoat backed up, making snorting noises that sounded less frightened and more annoyed.

As they neared closer to the trio pursuing them, Wallace picked up the scent of something unfamiliar in the air. It was almost the same sensation of a gas in the air, but something about it seemed more lethal. Wallace craned his neck, Gogoat was just a few feet from the blobs and the two ahead of them were separating, pushing Gogoat against the wall of a high ridge.

"Gogoat, attack!" Wallace called out. "Vine leaf. Razor whip. Do something!"

Gogoat only snorted and as the blobs ahead shuffled closer it reared back on its hind legs. Wallace's hands slipped free of the horns and he toppled off, falling flat on his back. Whatever was in the air choked him instantly, causing his throat to constrict and his lungs to burn.

Above him Gogoat cried and collapsed into a heap on the ground beside him. Wallace crawled to the fallen pokémon and noticed its weak breathing and hooded eyes. As a wave of hard coughs hit him, Wallace curled behind Gogoat and buried his face into the mass of leaves on its back.

The black and grey colors of the night began to meld as his vision blurred. His limbs were numbing and it suddenly felt like he was underwater again, every movement was sluggish and lazy. His head rolled to the side, exposing his nose exposed to more of the deadly haze and his mind wobbled.

"Hey! Get up!" Someone was shouting, but they sounded very far away.

Wallace's leaden view of the route cleared as a blue beacon lit up the field. It hovered a few feet above him and began to blink before several objects lit up in the field. He listened as what sounded like large balls were kicked through the grass.

As his mind darkened the last thing he remembered was a hand groping through his pockets and taking Gogoat's Poké Ball. What should have been a bright light was a murky smudge behind his eyelids as he drifted off.

* * *

Wallace opened his eyes to a newly familiar sight. He was back inside the Berry Field's house and Corbett, a zoroark, was lying beside him, a roguish grin on his face. He rolled to his back before he sat up and pinched the bridge of his nose. Wallace looked out of the corner of his eye and found Antoinette sitting at the table with a mug in her hands.

"We've got to stop meeting like this." The woman smiled, regardless of Wallace's displeased expression. "You know I'm very upset," she said, although her tone betrayed those words. "You spend a few days here, I feed you, take care of you, and in the middle of our first night together you sneak out. No goodbye? What's a girl supposed to think?" Antoinette grinned as she took a large gulp from her mug. "Good thing I followed you, huh?"

Her short brown hair was tied back with stands folded over her ears while beads of sweat dried on her sun-darkened skin. Like in their first meeting Wallace guessed she'd just gotten back from training. "You were following me?" he asked, his eyes squinted and face scrunched.

"Don't say it like that, all judgmental and pissed." Antoinette took another sip before she set the cup down and stood to stretch. "I saved your life, again. You're welcome."

Wallace rubbed his temples, he remembered his encounter in the field very vividly. "How long was I asleep?" he asked.

"Just through the night." Antoinette said.

"What were they?" Wallace asked. "Those things," he said, moving his hands in the air as he tried to mold their shape. "the things that attacked me. Pokémon, right?"

"Gulpin," Antoinette said, humor in her voice. "A horde of them, so I won't fault you for being ambushed. But their poison is no joke, you could have died out there. You and that Gogoat. Luckily I've got tons of antidotes. By the way, where did it come from?"

Wallace's hands flew to his pants, groping frantically for Gogoat's Poké Ball. "Where is it?"

"Outside, playing with my pokémon," Antoinette said, gesturing to the window. "Answer me, whose gogoat is that? I know you didn't catch or raise it."

"I'm borrowing it," Wallace said as he looked to the door and then the window above him.

"Does the owner know you're borrowing it?" Antoinette asked. "I should think they'd know better than to loan it to someone without a single badge."

Wallace had to catch himself from telling her Gogoat's owner was dead. Instead, he brushed off the question and stood to check the window. He studied the rows of berry trees, not seeing anything until a giant palm tree rushed out into the open field. Wallace watched in horror as he realized the tree wasn't a tree at all. It had legs and three heads, each with a terrified expression on their face. It seemed to be out of breath, but ran off again when Gogoat leapt at it, jumping and nipping playfully at long palm leaves sprouting from the pokémon's head.

"You have to meet me halfway here," Antoinette said.

Wallace looked down over his shoulder. Corbett had taken his spot on the floor and was nosing through the pile of blankets. "I don't know what you mean," he said.

"I get you out of a river and save you from hypothermia one day and a day later you're about to be poisoned to death by a group of gulpin. It seems like you've got a death wish. You can't blame me for being concerned." Antoinette walked to Wallace's side and placed a hand on his shoulder, forcing him to look at her.

Wallace kept quiet, but met Antoinette's hazel-green stare.

"Just tell me what you're trying to do, at least let me help," Antoinette said. "I still don't know anything about you, like where you're from. But from the few days you've spent here I can tell you're trying to get to Lumiose City, the why is the part I can't figure out. Also, who's Andrew? Is he the one they've been talking about on the news?"

Wallace's eyes hardened and his body tensed under her touch. "What?" he spat.

"You mentioned the name Andrew a few times in your sleep." Antoinette raised both her hands in front of her as she backed up. "The only Andrew I know of is the one they keep saying is missing on the news. Did you know him?"

Wallace tried to calm himself, to not look so tense, but he knew Antoinette had picked up on how upset mentioning Andrew made him. "Can you help me get into the city?" he asked.

Antoinette sighed and shook her head. "I don't think going into Lumiose is a good idea right now. I hear they're doing security checks on everyone coming in or trying to leave. I don't know what kind of time crunch you're on, but those kind of checkpoints could take hours."

The word _time_ hung in Wallace's mind. His father was expecting him home today, but he wondered if he didn't show up would he go to Camphrier to find him? His father was well-known and there would probably be no trouble getting through a checkpoint and if he was with him. Wallace looked to Antoinette, who he realized was still talking, when an idea hit him.

"But of course you would want to go to the only place in Kalos that's on lock down right now." Antoinette threw her hands in the air and walked off across the room. "I'll add it onto the list of odd things about you, stranger. I mean, I know Lumiose has a lot to offer, but what exactly has you on a suicide mission to get there?"

"School," Wallace said loud enough that his voice filled the room. "I'm supposed to be attending a university in a few weeks. That's why I need to get to Lumiose."

Antoinette turned slowly and threw a look back to him over her shoulder. "School?" she said as if her lips were testing the word itself. "A trainer school?"

"Yes, a trainer school. To learn about pokémon," Wallace said. "You saw it, how useless I am around them." Wallace gestured to the world outside and looked down to Corbett who had created a kind of nest from the blankets on the floor. "I'm trying to become a trainer and I thought a trainer school would help, I don't have anything to go back to, so I'm moving forward."

"Nothing to go back to?" Antoinette turned to face him fully and Wallace thought he saw something close to worry in her eyes. "As much as I want to pry, I won't. I know how much you hate that. But I just think it's strange you're supposed to be going away to school, but I found you in a river. I mean, why aren't your parents escorting you there?"

Wallace wet his lips and tried his best not to break eye contact with her. "Like I said, I don't have anything to go back to."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Antoinette said. "Maybe going to school is the best thing for you then. I mean, what were you doing before, back home?"

"Nothing I wanted to do." The answer was out before Wallace realized what he said. While laying on lie after lie to Antoinette, a bit of truth slipped free.

"I don't know everything, but if there's nothing you want to go home to then maybe starting over would be good for you." Antoinette took her seat at the table again and crossed her leg over her knee. "Thank you for telling me that. Huh, a trainer school, it kind of sounds fun. It'd be like a second chance, you know? Especially in a new city, you get to be a new person, anyone you want. I wonder if I'm too old to go to school."

Wallace tumbled Antoinette's words around in his mind. "A second chance to be anyone I want," he said under his breath.

Antoinette tipped her head up to him, her eyebrows high on her forehead. "You say something?"

"No, nothing." Wallace pursed his lips and smiled. "I think I'm going to head back to Camphrier, call a friend, have them take me to Lumiose. And return Gogoat," he added with a glance to the window.

"You're leaving again." Antoinette seemed to deflate on her chair as she hung her head. "Well, at least I have a heads up this time. Do you want me to walk with you?"

"No, you've done more than enough," Wallace said as he moved to grab his duffel bag. "I appreciate it, you know that, right?"

Antoinette frowned, but slowly nodded. "You've just got a funny way of showing it."

Wallace nodded too, silently agreeing with her. "Maybe someday we'll meet again and I'll get to repay the favor." He quickly rubbed Corbett on the head and moved towards the door before he looked back to Antoinette. "Thank you, again."

"Don't you want the Poké Ball?" Antoinette asked.

Wallace patted his own pockets before he remembered that she'd taken it off him last night. "Right, I forgot. Where is it?" he asked as he scanned the room.

"In my bra," she replied.

"Where's your bra?" Wallace looked around the floor, the room was clean except for his makeshift bed that Corbett had taken over. He briefly wondered if Corbett always slept there and he was only borrowing it.

He thought he would have remembered seeing a bra laying around, which is why he looked back to Antoinette with a mixture of fear and caution. Antoinette was only grinning as their eyes locked before she puffed out her chest.

"I—I'm not—I mean, I could just—Gogoat doesn't really need it." Wallace stammered on, but couldn't take his eyes off her chest as she stood and approached him.

"Relax, you look like you're going to pass out." Antoinette plucked the mini Poké Ball out the pocket of her shorts and pressed it to his chest.

Wallace let out a withheld breath as he took the ball and enlarged it. "You're something else," he said.

"Part of my charm." Antoinette said with a bow.

"Thanks again, Antoinette." Wallace said as he opened the door and stepped outside.

Antoinette nodded to his disappearing form and stuck her head out the door. She watched him walk carefully across the field, following the sounds of Gogoat's hooves. As he recalled the pokémon and left, Antoinette repeated Wallace's words to herself. "Maybe someday we'll meet again."

* * *

Wallace's walk back to Camphrier was much like his first, although less tense. The feeling that someone would recognize him was still there, but oddly in broad daylight he felt much better. Even though there were no pokémon to fear, being able to see and make out everything around him felt better than walking in the dark of night.

Once back inside the town's limits he headed straight for the Pokémon Center and phoned his father who'd been waiting all day for him to return. He explained the horde from the night before and after a brief conversation he was told to wait to be picked up.

With Antoinette's words still playing over his mind he stepped out of the Pokémon Center under a crystal blue and cloudless sky. _It'd be like a second chance._ He'd been repeating those words to himself the entire way. Without anywhere to go until his father, or more than likely a servant, arrived to pick him up, Wallace wandered the dirt and stone paths Camphrier had to offer when he found himself at a hotel.

He pushed his way inside and stepped into a wide lobby that was all polished wood and cream colored walls. Wallace walked across a tiled floor, blue and the same cream color on the walls, to a golden enameled wood information desk.

"Welcome to the Hotel Camphrier." A stout man behind the desk greeted him.

"Hi, is it okay if I just sit in here?" he asked, his eyes already looking for the best place to sit and wait.

"Of course! Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you, as I'm currently running this hotel by myself."

Wallace raised his brows in surprise and the man only nodded back. Wallace tightened his grip on his duffel before he turned and headed off to a set of three-seat couches in the left corner. A girl was already sitting in the middle of one of the couches so he took the other and placed the bag in his lap.

Without a phone—it was finally dawning on him he'd left it in his room—to occupy him, Wallace searched the room for something to busy him, but his eyes kept falling on the girl sitting across from him. She looked a bit frumpy, her entire body practically covered by a tattered grey hoodie, with white-blonde hair falling wildly around her on the couch.

Wallace couldn't help but watch as she operated a beaten up looking laptop and an equally ragged looking phone. She punched in keys on the phone before she placed it in her lap and started typing away on the laptop whose keys clicked loudly.

A few times one of her eyes, one her hair wasn't covering, flicked in his direction and he looked away, though always a second too late. The last time it happened he kept his eyes on a far wall when he heard her start a phone call. Panic brewed in him at the thought that she might be calling someone because she was tired of him staring, but as the conversation started it seemed to be heading in a different direction.

"H–Hi, I'm–I'm calling with a problem. I–I can't seem to register f–for one of my classes." She uncurled from her spot on the couch and grabbed the laptop, holding it near her chest.

Wallace's eyes caught sight of movement under the girl's hoodie and couldn't help but give it his full attention. He watched as an oblong shape wriggled where her stomach was before a large set of black jaws shot out from under the hoodie and snapped together.

Wallace jolted back on the couch with a gasp of air. "What is that?" he yelped.

His reaction alarmed the girl, who only acknowledged the mouth poking out of her hoodie by rubbing the upper jaw. As she began scratching it, the body of a small yellow pokémon emerged from its hiding place and slid onto the ground. It was bipedal with a yellow body with black limbs. As it turned to Wallace he could see it had a face and that the jaws were actually an appendage on the back of its head. It seemed to be smiling at him, enjoying his panicked expression.

"Um, I-I tried to fix it online, b-but it said to call this n–number. M–My name? Oh—"

A wide blue eye looked up and locked onto Wallace. He snapped his head to the side, far too late, and mentally cursed himself for staring again. He kept listening, but the girl seemed to be whispering now as she relayed her name over the phone.

To keep himself occupied he thought back to conversation with Antoinette: _I_ _f there's nothing you want to_ _go_ _home to then maybe starting over would be good for you._

Things back home didn't seem to be as bad as he thought they'd be. No one knew what happened to Andrew, and he was in the clear. If he returned he knew that's what his father wanted, for them to keep on living as if nothing had happened. But could he? Wallace shook the thought away, he shouldn't be hoping that he'd get away with this.

It was an accident, but only at his father's urging had he ran away. Maybe if he returned and explained what happened the police would understand. Or maybe not, Wallace thought. He ran from them, the entire city is on a lockdown and searches are being conducted all because of him. The police were following up on a possible home invasion and missing person's case all because of him. There's no slap on the wrist for that, especially not when they discovered why he really ran.

"Y-Yes, I-I just got the university's email. Yes, f-from R-Radix Web Advisor. I-I think it went through, t-thank you very much." she hit a few buttons on her phone before she sat it beside her and went back to work on her laptop.

Try as he might Wallace couldn't help but look to the girl now. A university, the word Radix. Both echoed in his mind. Wallace unzipped his duffel and dug around inside for the letter from yesterday. He skimmed the water damaged page for the same words. Radix University, whatever it was, had wanted him to speak at a symposium. Keeping the paper in hand, Wallace scooted forward and waved at the girl. "Hi, excuse me."

The girl looked up from her laptop, fixing an eye on him. She fingered back a loose strand of hair behind her ear and lowered her phone. "Hi," she answered timidly.

"Hi," Wallace said, again, followed by a laugh. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but were you talking about a university?"

The girl nodded slowly, her lips parting slowly before she spoke quietly. "I-It's my school. W-Well, I-I mean, I'll be g-going there s-soon."

Wallace looked to the laptop and then to her phone. She had contact information for the school, the only thing his letter was missing. His mind began working in overdrive.

It wasn't any wonder his father wanted him home. _You and I,_ _we'_ _re the only one_ _s_ _who know what really happened._ If he decided to come clean, a thought that had been in the back of his mind all along, who knows what kind of trouble that would bring for his father. As much trouble as he'd be in for running, his father's punishment would undoubtedly be worse for covering it up. The one advantage he had from running was that he hadn't spoken a word of that night to anyone, but if he knew his father he'd probably been speaking to reporters non-stop. His father had already let it slip what he wanted their lie to be, that Andrew had left to travel again. With Wallace at his side, his father would surely wish Andrew the best on his travels, putting on a fake smile for the young man he had planned to take under his wing at Pearce Productions.

 _If there's nothing you want to go home to then maybe starting over would be good for you._

He repeated Antoinette's words over and over in his mind like a mantra. Andrew returning home was the only thing he looked forward to and without him there was nothing left in Lumiose for him, not unless he wanted to play a role in his father's cover-up.

Wallace pulled back from his thoughts and realized he was staring at the girl, who, at some point, seemed to have grown uncomfortable under his gaze and was now staring at the floor. _A_ _t_ _rainer school, it kind of sounds fun. It'd be like a second chance, you know?_ Without further thought, Wallace knew what he had to do. It was the only thing he'd done since he came out of the river. Lie.

"I was supposed to give the university a call today, but my paper with their number on it got wet. Could I use your phone to call them?"

The girl's eye shifted from the floor, to Wallace, and to the crumpled letter in his hands. "Um, s–sure," she said softly. She slowly picked her phone back up and tapped in a series of numbers before she placed it on the table and quickly brought her hand back to her lap.

Wallace smiled and carefully picked up the phone and held it near his ear. "Hello?" he said, his eyes on the girl who was slinking back onto the couch, as if to get as far away from him as possible. The pokémon with the second mouth climbed back into her lap where it watched him with red eyes.

"This is Kolton Fafnir, student worker for the Office of Student Accounts, how may I direct your call?"

Wallace was taken aback by the young, but professional sounding voice on the line. "Yes, I was wondering if you could tell me about the upcoming school year?"

"Our academic school year begins next week, August 22nd. Did you have a question about housing?" Kolton asked.

"Not exactly, well yes, but really what I wanted was to enroll." Wallace stammered out, clenching his free hand so tight his nails dug into his palm. Although he couldn't see the entire face of the girl across from him, he was sure he'd seen a slight twinge of shock in the visible half of her face. There was a silence on the line and Wallace swore he heard something like laughter before Kolton spoke up.

"I'm sorry, but our school year starts next week. I don't think it would be possible to get you enrolled and settled in by then. But if you'd like to get started on the enrollment process, possibly for a spot in our roster for the spring semester I can send you our application packet."

"No, see I really wanted to attend, but I didn't get around to enrolling before now." Wallace stood and began to pace the sitting area, aware the girl was still watching him. He wasn't sure where these words were coming from, but he didn't stop to think about it, just let the lies keep coming.

"I understand," Kolton sighed and remained silent for a beat before he spoke again, sounding a bit annoyed. "But I really don't think there's anything I can do on my end to help you at this moment."

"I can get you my transcript—"

"A transcript doesn't change the fact that—"

"Tuition won't be a problem at all—"

"Good for you, but you have to understand that—"

"I don't even have to live on campus—"

"Your living arrangement is a different matter, if you would just listen—"

"I'll take whatever classes you have available," Wallace said, still talking overtop Kolton.

"LISTEN TO ME!"

As Kolton barked through the line Wallace yanked the phone away from his ear. He looked over to the girl who looked startled as well, Kolton had been that loud.

"It's not my fault you're lazy and waited until the _very_ last minute to enroll. There's literally nothing, hear me again, nothing, I can do for you!"

Wallace kept the phone away from his ear, Kolton was still yelling, but he started at the phone in disbelief of the venomous tone the student had taken. "I know I'm being difficult, but please, there has to be something you can do for me." Wallace pleaded. He waited for Kolton to start yelling again, but after several moments of silence he thought he'd hung up on him. "Hello?" he asked as he put the phone back to his ear.

"Hello, this is Mrs. Dumas, you had a question about enrollment for our fall semester?" An older voice asked through the phone.

The change in voices jarred him, Kolton must have stormed off, or something. "Yes," Wallace said before he held a hand over the phone. "Do you mind if I step over there for a second?" he asked over his shoulder.

The girl opened her mouth to reply, but only exhaled slightly and shook her head.

Wallace flashed her a bright smile and headed towards the entrance. If a late enrollment wasn't getting by a student, there was no way he was getting it past an adult and he didn't need the girl hearing him changing his story. Time for plan B, he thought. "I was supposed to attend this semester, but was busy with an internship and didn't get around to sending my paperwork in. So I wanted to know if it was possible for me to somehow get enrolled. I know it's last minute, but I can pay the entire tuition up front, I just really want to be a part of your university." Wallace sucked in a deep breath after conjuring and spewing out lie after lie. He knew he probably sounded desperate and like a total joke to Mrs. Dumas, but he didn't care.

"What internship were you working with?" she asked softly.

"It was a summer internship for Pearce Productions," he said, thinking about the letter he received. "I had planned on attending the university before I started and I knew the school was a big client of Pearce Productions and thought spending a summer learning about the corporation would prove useful to me once classes started." Wallace could feel his heart thundering away in his chest. He'd never needed to lie before, to anyone, not his father, not Andrew. It was an exhilarating and terrifying feeling.

After a prolonged silence on the line Wallace wondered if this happened often? If people claimed to have worked under for the company to get ahead in some way. "Actually ma'am, I was working directly under Arlan Pearce. I'd met him months before and he was the one who pushed me to enroll and part of the deaL with my internship was that he said he'd pay my way. I know he probably feels terrible for keeping me from getting my paperwork sent in, but if you could somehow get me in I know he'd really appreciate it, maybe even make a donation?" Wallace clenched his eyes shut, wishing he could do the same with his mouth as more lies dribbled out. But this was something he'd seen his father do countless times, drop his name and the promise of a donation to get the ball rolling. "I know this is last minute, but I know the Pearce family would make sure the university is well compensated for making this happen. I became something of Arlan's protégé through my internship."

Wallace cupped a hand over the phone and let his eyes roll to the back of his head. "Shut up, stop talking," he groaned to himself before he brought the phone back to his ear.

"What was your name?" Mrs. Dumas asked.

"Wallace Pe—" Wallace swallowed down his last name and tossed out the first thing that came to mind. "Peters. Wallace Peters, ma'am."

"Well, Mr. Peters I'm sure you know our semester is about to begin so many of our classes have already been filled, the same applies for our dormitories, but if you're intent on being a student I will see what I can do about securing a spot for you."

"Thank you!" Wallace cheered.

"But you'll have to bring personal identification as well as a copy of your transcript and be able to pay our housing deposit up front," Mrs. Dumas said. "Will any of that be a problem?"

"No, not at all."

"Okay then, I will start your student account and get you on the waitlist for as many classes as possible and once you're here you can opt out of whichever you don't want. Once you're here you'll be able have to finish the paperwork that I'll start for you and submit it. Once that is done you'll be enrolled, okay?" Mrs. Dumas said.

"Yes, I understand, thank you again!"

"Thank you, Mr. Peters. We look forward to seeing you."

Wallace squeezed the phone tightly as the call ended and rounded the corner, back to the girl who had withdrawn into the comforts of her hoodie. "Thank you, you're a lifesaver," he said as he walked over to hand her phone back. "What's your name?"

The girl nodded and carefully took her phone back and placed it in her lap. "A-Arlette."

"Nice to meet you, Arlette. I'm Wallace Peters," he said, a little too proudly. "I guess we'll be going to school together, maybe I'll see you there?" Wallace asked as he zipped up his duffel and swung it over his shoulder.

Again, the girl only managed a nod, her lips parting slowly as if she were about to speak.

"Well, bye, thanks again." Wallace waved her off and headed to the door and pushed his way back into Camphrier Town.

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ I know that the options to store items & mail in the PC in the games were removed once they made the trainer bag bigger, but it worked really well with the story and it was always a feature I loved, so forgive me!  
Two character debuts this chapter, **Kolton Fafnir** by **ShadedLyht** and **Arlette** by **Oly in Flight**. And the return of Wallace's savior, **Antoinette DelaRosa.**  
I managed to rack up a good number of characters, so for now I've decided to close character submissions. I messaged some of you who haven't returned forms about this. If you have a form you haven't returned before now and I haven't contacted you about it, I won't be accepting your character(s) any longer, but thank you for your interest in the story.

 **Question of the Chapter #3: Do you think Wallace deserves a chance to make a better life for himself?**


	5. Mr Pearce

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Five – Mr. Pearce**

 _He who was living is now dead  
We who were living are now dying – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

As Wallace predicted, his father hadn't come himself to collect him from Camphrier Town. Jason, an information technology assistant, who his father was fond of and who Wallace had met just once on a visit to Pearce Productions' main office, came in his place.

Jason escorted him through the downhill path of Versant Road filled with sudden drops, dead ends, wild patches of grass, railings that dipped off into paths exclusively for more adventurous travelers, and scaly rock cliffs. Centuries of weathering left behind broad beds and chutes where wild flowers grew rampant with only the occasional wildlife to disturb them.

He also kept Wallace away from any potential battles and through the connecting gate into Lumiose with a signed letter by Arlan to grant them permission through. Wallace said his goodbyes to Jason once they reached the city and hailed the first taxi he found and headed for home.

It'd only been three days since that night, but the foyer of his townhouse had never looked more different to him. It wasn't the space itself; the foyer remained as it always had. The space was clean, immaculate, and the portraits on the wall stared blankly ahead as they'd done since the day of their creation. But his last memory of this place had forever tainted it.

Spots on the floor where sunlight glinted off the tile were spoiled in his mind by shadows and blood. His eyes found the staircase and he saw himself, sitting stone-faced at the top, while Andrew's body twisted and rolled to the bottom. The meeting of bone, flesh, and stone thundered in his ears. Beyond that was the sound of Andrew's final word.

"Wallace."

He twitched and jerked his head to the side. His father stood there looking, somehow, bored and surprised at the same time. "Wallace," Arlan said again and placed a hand carefully on Wallace's shoulder.

Wallace watched something unfamiliar flash in his father's eyes and felt his hand tense on his shoulder. He saw a change in Arlan's posture and for a moment he thought he might be pulled into a hug.

"Welcome home." Arlan slipped his hand free of his shoulder and placed it on his hips. The world's suited savior looked uncomfortable.

A voice coming from an adjacent room caught his attention. Wallace's brow line furrowed as he looked past his father to see into their sitting room.

"Ah, I'm meeting with someone at the moment," Arlan said. "It's why I had Jason bring you back. Speaking of, where is he?"

"I told him to enjoy his day off," Wallace said, his eyes still on the neighboring room. By the voice he could tell it was a woman and she seemed to be having a one-sided conversation, on a phone possibly. "You never have meetings at the house."

Arlan winced and wrung his hands together. "It's a detective."

Wallace felt his heart drop and land with a _**thunk**_ in his gut. "Detective." He barely got the word out as his head started to spin. "W-Why?"

Arlan placed a hand on his shoulder and another on the center of his back and led him to the stairs. "It's nothing to worry about, everything is fine, we were just finishing up. Why don't you go upstairs and take a shower and get changed? You look like you've been through a lot. We'll talk in a bit."

Wallace paused at the base of the stairs, physically unable to take the first step. His limbs felt weak, but heavy at the same time. He gripped the railing as he wavered and felt his father's hands press harder into him.

"Are you alright? Why didn't you get something to eat with Jason?" Arlan stepped up beside him, careful not to let him go. "You look like you're going to faint."

"I can't –"

"Can't eat?"

"The stairs," he said, his eyes focused on a spot at the top of the steps.

"Oh." Arlan looked the staircase up and down and rubbed a circle in Wallace's back before he pulled him away and ushered him to the right. "Will you be able to make it up the set of stairs in the living room? If not just wait in the kitchen until I'm finished."

Wallace nodded and dipped off down a short hallway into their kitchen before he crossed into the living room and hurried up a carpeted set of stairs that led to their den. From there he headed through his father's room and towards his own. As he passed the main flight of stairs he couldn't help but stare down them before he ducked into his bedroom.

Everything was as he left it, except his window which looked firmly shut. But the disarray he'd created in his mad dash to pack and leave was still evident. Clothes were strewn about the floor, shoes and hangers spilled out of his closest and his dresser was practically bare while all of its remaining contents laid on the floor.

Without thinking about it, Wallace dropped his duffel bag and grabbed a few things from his dresser drawers before he headed to the bathroom. The promise of a hot shower called to him.

Although it seemed like Antoinette had everything she needed at her temporary house in Berry Fields, the one thing she lacked was a shower. To stay clean she often bathed in a river or had Philo, Antoinette's lapras that rescued him from the river, spray her with water. Considering Antoinette insisted they shower together when asking Philo, something about not abusing Philo's abilities, Wallace opted for washing up in the river, which was unpleasant and brought back its own slew of nightmarish memories.

After undressing and waiting for the water to reach the point of nearly burning his skin, he took the chance to look over his body. It was an odd feeling, that his body could look different than he remembered it. But he couldn't remember the last time he ate. At Antoinette's surely, something made from berries, the one thing she had plenty of on hand.

Already thin to begin with, he'd definitely lost more weight. But maybe, if he was supposed to be someone new, this was only the beginning. The walking he and Jason did through Versant Road had been torture, but Jason treated it like it was literally a walk in the park. Part of the trainer life he guessed. He imagined that if he did become a trainer the pains he felt from his hike would fade and transform into muscle. His light skin would darken as Andrew's had from months under the sun.

As he stepped into the shower his mind flashed back to Andrew. Although the boy he knew from nine years ago was still a part of Andrew, somewhere, the person that returned to Kalos was certainly different. Andrew had said so himself, that his journey had changed him. Certainly the physical aspect was there. Andrew was easily winded during his first streams on PokéView, but as time went on he scaled cliff sides with ease and even dared to swim an entire route in Hoenn.

Wallace stepped closer to the shower head and let the scalding droplets pelt his head and shoulders. He watched the bottom of the tub as his sweat and dirt from his last day in the wild swirled down the drain. He could train, become stronger, physically, but the question in the back of his mind was what else might change? Changing his name, his appearance, it would only go so far. Could a lost cause reinvent himself into someone worth saving? Into someone who didn't buckle under Andrew's threats?

Wallace eased down into a crouch and let the water pound against his back and he gripped his shoulders, working out the tense muscles there. Had he been stronger maybe he wouldn't have caved at the thought of losing everything. But where would he be if Andrew had confronted his father? Where would Charles and his own father be? Where would Andrew be?

"Alive," he said as water poured down his face and trickled over his lips.

As the thoughts rolled over one another in his head Wallace rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He worked out the muscles in his neck and tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. The shower's water struck his neck and chest, the spray dotting his face as tears gathered along his eyes.

For the first time in three days he was alone again, even if just for a moment, and under the cover of the shower Wallace let himself grieve for the death of his best friend.

* * *

Wallace felt several pounds lighter after scrubbing the grime from his skin and letting the blistering hot water wash it away. And the tears shed under the shelter of the shower's water might have eased a deep ache in his chest.

With his skin pink and tender, Wallace stalked through their kitchen. As he rounded the edge of the largest of their kitchen islands, Wallace heard his father ushering the visiting detective out. He peered around the corner in time to see his father shutting the door and giving one great big exhale before he caught his eye.

"You hungry?" Arlan asked as he strode through the hall and into the kitchen, he paused at the counter and pressed a piece of paper down. "I could uh – throw something together for you."

Wallace eased himself down onto a high stool at one end of the island and craned his neck over the paper his father laid down. **Minako Fujioka – Private Investigator.** He lifted his eyes from the card and watched as his father moved uneasily around the room.

Their kitchen was modern, and like everything else in their townhouse, shining and clean. Everything was stainless steel and white tile, filled with professional grade equipment. Although they had a pair of chefs on-call, his father was hardly home and Wallace never bothered to call and have them prepare something. The result was usually him banging around in the kitchen, attempting to make something that would feed him for multiple days. For the life of him he couldn't remember the last time he watched his father eat something at home, let alone cook it.

"What now?" he asked once watching Arlan open and close the refrigerator got boring.

"Something to drink?" Arlan asked with a bit more confidence. Pouring liquid into a glass was something he could do with ease.

Wallace remained silent as he watched Arlan rummage around looking for glasses before he filled two with water from the sink and leaned across the island. Arlan slid the glass of water to Wallace who only ran a finger around the rim, letting the silence carry on before Arlan hung his head in defeat.

"Charles has been calling, asking for you," Arlan said, his eyes focused on his own water.

Wallace shifted uncomfortably on the stool, feeling his stomach twist into a knot."What did you tell him?" he asked. If Charles was calling for him, was he also calling about Andrew?

"That you were out of the city, visiting a friend."

"I don't have any friends," Wallace said off the top of his head.

"Funny, he said the same thing." Arlan straightened up as a fit of laughter broke out from his lips. "But he wanted to see you once you got back. Said he had something for you, something Andrew left behind."

Wallace winced at the idea and the knot his intestines turned into tightened.

"Speaking of, I've spoken to the news station and set up an interview. We'll go over our story tonight and tomorrow afternoon we'll make our statement for all of Lumiose to see. After that, I think it might be a good idea for you to get out of the city." Arlan rushed the last part out of his mouth and quickly went to sipping his water.

Wallace's eyes flicked up to meet his father's. "You don't want me around?"

Arlan's expression softened as he lowered his glass. "I just figured that it might be difficult for you to be here without him. So think, money isn't an object, where would you like to go? You could finally have the life of a trainer, I know you always wanted that." Arlan paused and tapped his fingers against the island's top before he jolted upright again. "You seemed to like Unova when we visited last year for that seminar. I can have a loft in Castelia City ready for you in an hour."

Wallace tried to keep his expression flat and unreadable, but as Arlan studied his face he realized he'd failed once he came over and sat beside him.

"I'm not forcing you to go," Arlan said.

Wallace clenched his jaw to refrain from replying. It certainly felt that way.

"I saw how you looked at the stairs. What happened here was an accident, and I know it must be killing – sorry. I know it must be hard on you to be here after what happened. I know you have questions, but what I did was to protect you and I don't want you dwelling on it. I just think that you getting away and clearing your head, having something to focus on, would be best for you."

"Our villa. In Undella Town," Wallace said quietly and averted his eyes from his father. "I'll go there."

Arlan rocked back on his seat and twisted his mouth around as he considered it. "You haven't been there since you were little. I'm surprised you remember it. Do you remember our neighbors, the Riches?"

"Yes."

"That's good," Arlan said before he patted his knees. "I'm sure they'll be happy to see you again. You want me to arrange your transportation?"

"No, I'll take care of it. That detective, what was she doing here?" Wallace asked as he slid off the stool to stand, his eyes glancing over the business card again.

"Ah." Arlan pat his knees again before he stood and grabbed the glasses of water. "Hired by Charles to find Andrew. She wanted to meet you, apparently she's spoken to quite a few of Andrew's friends in the city and they've all named you as his closest friend. Naturally she wanted to speak with you."

Wallace furrowed his brow and looked back down the hallway to the foyer. "Then why did she leave?"

"I told her you never came home after his birthday party. That you left right away and that you'd be home for the first time today," Arlan said. "Knowing you, you came straight home after the party so I doubt anyone can say otherwise and it's mostly true."

"I got it," Wallace said as he lingered in the kitchen.

"So," Arlan said with a loud clap of his hands. "I think you should go see Charles. Makes sense on account of all that's happened. Relax and unwind today. Tomorrow we'll make our statement and then you're off to the beach."

Wallace forced a smile as he slinked out of the kitchen and made his way upstairs via the back staircase. He walked to his room and dumped the contents of his duffel onto his bed. He picked around the pile for a bit and pulled out the claim ticket for the dozen big nuggets he wasn't able to cash in in Camphrier. He bit his lip as he looked over the ticket. Was $120,000 enough to start a new life? He considered the balance of his own accounts, but without a way to withdraw or transfer it all at once without raising suspicion it was practically useless. Wallace's brows shot up as an idea hit him and he set off towards to his father's study.

* * *

By the time Wallace reached the Gates house, the sun had already passed its peak and was beginning its slow decent to drop below the horizon. Charles answered the door after a few minutes and warmly greeted him.

Without room in the city to build actual houses, homes in Lumiose ended up being constructed as studio apartments or townhouses that were actually just a series of apartments that had undergone construction to function as one multi-layered townhouse. The Gates residence fell somewhere between with Charles Gates owning the entire first floor of his building.

Charles led Wallace past several well decorated rooms before they paused in the center of their floor plan. The design saw the house spread outwards like a star with five different hallways leading to bedrooms while the center acted as its own lobby.

He'd never visited Charles after Andrew left on his journey, but the house was oddly familiar. He wasn't sure what was the same from nine year ago, but some works of art: long portraits and busts, rung a bell with him. Although Charles held a highly sought after position as one of Pearce Productions high ranking executives, the difference between the Gates and Pearce family wealth was insurmountable.

"You've heard about Andrew?" Charles asked, his tone implying it was more of an assumption than a question. "Did he say anything to you at the party?"

"He didn't want the job with my father," Wallace said, thinking back to the night and party and doing everything he could to avoid looking at Charles. Lying to strangers was hard enough, but could he stare into the eyes of his best friend's father and give him false hope that someday his son would return home?

"I figured that much."

Wallace glanced at Charles for a second and saw a look that seemed to way Charles required more convincing. "He said he'd rather just travel some more. He mentioned something about a seventh region." Peppering in the truth everyone now and then seemed to be the best option.

Charles grimaced and rubbed a hand over his mouth and turned away before he looked at Wallace over his shoulder. "You really think he left Kalos again? Why wouldn't he tell me?"

Wallace studied Charles' face from an angle, the normally shaved man was sporting an uncharacteristically thick and uneven amount of facial hair. "He probably thought you'd make him take the job, you already made him apologize to my father. I'm sure he wanted to tell you, but thought it might be a problem." Wallace thought about the news reports that said Andrew was last seen at one of the city's Pokémon Centers, which would fit the bill if he was about to leave the region. But thinking further back he recalled the reason he was in this situation in the first place. Andrew was going to expose his father, he'd learned that Arlan was stealing money and that he threatened Charles to keep quiet. Who else would Andrew have heard it from other than Charles?

"So you never saw Andrew after the party?"

Wallace snapped out of his thoughts and replied automatically. "No." But the more thought he gave it the more Charles wasn't making sense. Andrew had to hear about the threats from his own father. Is it possible Charles had seen Andrew, but –

"Well the reason I wanted to see you is because Andrew brought something home with him, he said it was a gift for you," Charles said, breaking Wallace's concentration again. "This whole thing has got me all turned around. He was so excited about it I can't believe he didn't give it to you before he left. Well, it's in his room, you remember where it's at?"

Wallace nodded and then watched as Charles weakly gestured down one of the many halls before he walked off still rubbing his mouth. He kept his eyes on the man's retreating back as he headed down the north hallway and into Andrew's room, the last on the right.

On his first step inside he was swarmed by emotions. The room belonged to Andrew, but not the Andrew that had returned to Kalos, the Andrew that was ten years old with a love for dragons and video games. Andrew's bed was the same small one he remembered hiding under during bouts of hide and go seek, the sheets the same powder blue ones with designs of pokémon whose name he'd forgotten. The walls were a matching blue and coated with posters from boxes of cereal, movie debuts, and drawings Andrew and he had done over a decade ago.

As he wandered towards Andrew's dresser Wallace took in the nostalgia. Andrew's shellder alarm clock sat beside the bed, with a black display screen where shielder's face would have been. A snorlax beanbag chair sat in one of the corners looking thoroughly abused. Stickers of a fletchling flock peeled away from their spot on the ceiling, their wings curved as if the birds were ready to take flight any moment.

At the dresser Wallace opened the top right drawer and rummaged around until he round a pair of black socks with yellow trim. He pulled the balled up pair apart and was rewarded with a folded up slip of paper. He couldn't up but smile as he unfolded the paper.

 _ANDREW G.'s POKÉMON LIST  
1\. Awesome dragon!  
2\. Cool blue water-type!  
3\. Another awesome dragon!  
4\. Cool!  
5\. Flying something!  
6\. Something strong!_

Wallace grinned at the paper as he tried to figure out what pokémon the Andrew from a decade ago would have wanted, but with only the cacography to guide him, it was hopeless. There were smudges and marks over the paper where Andrew had erased list entires and scribbled down new ones.

He had a similar list, they'd both made one at the age of seven, but his had been discovered by his father and ended up a pile of shredded scraps by the age of eight.

Wallace folded the sheet back up and stuffed it inside one of the socks before he balled them back up and tossed them into the drawer. He turned to look over the room once more and inhaled the deep scent of Andrew's cologne. He let it settle in his lungs when his eyes caught something sitting on a shelf by Andrew's closet.

It rested on a plastic base on top of the shelf, blue-green, oval shaped and about the size of a small melon. Wallace approached it cautiously and trailed his fingers down the front of an honest to goodness pokémon egg. The face of the egg was decorated with black symmetrical lines and colored dots that looked as if a child had drawn over it.

Wallace admired the egg again and placed his hand flat against it, warm, like the room itself. His eyes fell to a piece of paper stuck to the plastic base before he pulled it free.

 _It's my homecoming, but I have a present for you.  
_ _I knew I wanted to bring you back a_ _p_ _okémon, it just took forever to figure out which one! I remembered how much you said you liked this particular one so I caught one and bred it to get this egg._ _I figured out how long it would take to hatch_ _so_ _I've_ _done most of the hard work for you._ _If you look after it it_ _should be about ready to hatch. -_ _D_ _rew_

Wallace felt the a twinge in his eyes at the onset of tears and balled the note in his hand. As he turned his eyes back on the egg something resting at the bottom of Andrew's closet caught his eye.

Wallace crouched and pulled a heavy camouflage backpack from the closet. Attached to it was a black belt with six Poké Balls hanging from it. As Wallace ran his fingers over them he noticed they were all considerably worn. The bottoms were the pristine white he knew them to be, instead they were a dingy yellow like faded paper. The red tops were scuffed and riddled with scratches. The idea of releasing Andrew's team occurred to him, but for all he knew something might be inside that was too big to fit into the room. Or worse, something that was less placid than Gogoat and more likely to attack him.

Instead, he unzipped Andrew's bag and dug around inside. It was crammed full of mostly camping supplies. A sleeping bag, a collapsible tent, some clothes, and plastic bags filled with matches, snack food, and toiletries. Near the bottom of the bag he found a small black box that he didn't think twice about opening. The box opened upside down and several small objects fell out from inside along with a folded up note.

Wallace ran his fingers over the box's contents. There were six in total and all were small metal trinkets. He recognized one as Lumiose Tower, there was a tree, a snowflake, and two pokémon he didn't recognize. One was a fish and the other stood on two legs with what looked like water pouring out of two flowers for hands.

He grabbed the note next and carefully unfolded the pink paper.

 _Andrew,_ _I know you said charms are girly things, but if they're on a keychain, you could wear them, right?_ _\- Lita_

"Lita," he said aloud. The same name he found on many of the messages in Andrew's inbox. Wallace ran his fingers over the paper while he mulled over who Lita might be before he folded the note up and began stuffing everything back into Andrew's bag.

* * *

The night had slammed down over Lumiose, a hazy galaxy of stars were barely visible against light that pulsated off the city's most important buildings. The moon was a solid cut-out in the inky black sky that rippled with remnants of clouds.

Hours had passed inside the Gates' home with Charles insisting on Wallace staying for dinner. Although he accepted, he didn't find himself eating as much as pushing the food around while Charles pressed him for more questions about Andrew. When Charles seemed satisfied with Wallace's one word responses and subtle silence, he excused himself and headed for home.

A shortcut back to his townhouse left Wallace dawdling between buildings in an alley route of Rouge Plaza. His focus was on his egg which sat snugly in his backpack, its solid weight a pleasant addition as he held on tight to the straps.

As he passed between two storefronts he suddenly regretted giving Jason his dinner reservations. The stark black and gold door of Sushi High Roller called to him and a medley of aromas wafted from the open doorway. While he listened to the sounds of what he guessed was a raging battle inside, Wallace's hands trailed along the opposite wall, running over bumps and blocks of another store's entrance.

Unlike Sushi High Roller's the lights were off inside, but he catch a lazy yellow glow in the far back of the store. He remembered at some point the store was vacant and for sale, but the signs advertising such had long disappeared.

Curiosity, and the desire to stay away from home a bit longer, led him inside. The storefront was gloomy and a dank jumble of odors: spoiled food, cigarette smoke, dish soap, body odor, and husky cologne. Wallace ventured only a few steps inside across what felt like a tiled floor against his shoes that squalled under him. The bit of moonlight that reached inside cast a weak arcing glow across the floor that didn't reach fully across the room. The rest of the room was pitifully lit by a single sconce that hung from the opposite wall. Wallace spotted other fixtures along the walls, all hanging without light.

"You lost or somethin', kid?"

Startled, Wallace craned his neck to the side. Out of the shadows came a man's sunken in face illuminated by the fleeting flame of a lighter.

"Unless you got a death wish this don't look like the place for you, kid. " As the man stepped forward, his heavy footsteps thunking against the floor, his body became illuminated by moonlight slipping through the blinds.

Wallace made out a pair of tattered and faded jeans, lots of leather, and a lazy blue-green mohawk that rested in the center of the man's shaved head.

"Nothin' to say, kid? What, you stupid or somethin'?" Mohawk barked at Wallace before he hung his a cigarette between his lips, scowling at him the entire time.

Wallace's mouth opened, though nothing but an airy whimper came from it. He slowly backed up through the doorway, but paused when a hand fell on his shoulder.

"Yo, we got a customer?"

"Nah, I don't think so. This kid's dumb or somethin'," Mohawk said without bothering to take out his cigarette.

Wallace dared a looked over his shoulder to find a lanky woman standing behind him. She wore a loose black tank top and with her free hand she mindlessly twirled a pink braid, one of many that sprouted from her scalp. He looked back to Mohawk in time to see a slender arm peek out of the shadows and its hand land with a wet _**smack**_ against Mohawk's cheek.

Mohawk recoiled from the strike and staggered to the side, cursing and groaning as he tripped over something and landed with a thud on the floor. "Dammit!" he howled. "My cig!"

The hand on Wallace's shoulder vanished, but he was sure he heard it sliding against the wall before the room was flooded with light.

"Sorry about them. My associates have no idea what excellent customer service is. Welcome to the Forgery, where your imagination comes true. So to speak."

"This kid's not a customer, look at him!"

Wallace's throbbing eyes fell to Mohawk who was sprawled on the floor and flicking dirt off his cigarette before it popped it back between his lips.

"Maybe you're right." The woman moved out from behind him and as she plucked at his shirt, studied him up and down. "He don't look like our usual, uh, clientele," she said with a sweet smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.

Wallace grimaced at the sight of her off-yellow teeth and eased away from her skeletal hands. She shrugged and walked across the room, Wallace couldn't help his eyes falling to her waist at the sight of a pair of barely there shorts.

"Hey, if he needs a new identity and his money spends, who cares what he looks like?"

Wallace turned to the other man. Unlike Mohawk and Yellow Teeth, he looked rather normal. Practically on par with Wallace in terms of height and build, his hair was jet black under the store's lights and pulled back into a sloppy tail with wild strands poking out in various places. Wallace watched as he pulled the sleeves of a deep red sweater halfway up his arms, as if purposefully showing off a series of scratches and scars. Aside from a scar on his chin, Wallace found the man's most striking feature to be his eyes. Slitted and heavily hooded Wallace couldn't tell if the man's eyes were even open, but as he moved Wallace caught a glint of light off of dark eyes that were certainly locked on him.

"A new identity?" Wallace asked, his eyes still trained on Snake Eyes in front of him whose mouth curved into a smirk.

"Jeez, he really is stupid," Mohawk said once he was up. He shimmied around in his leather jacket and massaged his jaw, his cheek one large bright red handprint.

"That's why we're called the Forgery," Yellow Teeth said. She raised her arms to shrug and snaked her head side to side in a dance-like motion. "So what's up, yo? Need a fake ID? How old are you?"

"18," he replied automatically.

"So that's a yes on the ID." Snake Eyes said as he pulled a pad of paper and a pen from behind his back.

"Wait, you make trainer licenses?" Wallace asked and held his hand out to Snake Eyes who had already started jotting down something on his pad. "Fake ones, like if someone wanted to be a different person, you help with that?"

"Yo, do I need to break out an encyclopedia for you?" Yellow Teeth asked as she plopped down behind a large wooden desk in the center of the room. "Show you the definition of a forger?"

"Stupid," Mohawk said. "That ain't what an encyclopedia is for."

"You want me to show you what my foot is for?" Yellow Teeth quipped. As if to emphasize her point she swung her legs up and a pair of spiked leather boots slammed onto the desk.

Before Wallace noticed, Snake Eyes closed the distance between him and had an arm wrapped his shoulder. Wallace uneasily walked as Snake Eyes led him to a small walled off sitting area on the left side of the room.

"Ignore them," Snake Eyes said. "The sexual tension between them could burn this place down. I find it hard to get any work done when they're here together."

Before they were out of sight behind the set a of collapsible walls, Wallace glanced back to see Mohawk and Yellow Teeth looking embarrassed, but also managing to glare furiously at him.

Inside the impromptu room the false walls created was a three-seat couch and a chair separated by a square coffee table. "Have a seat. Let's discuss what brought you in. While I admit you don't look like our normal customer, we can still help you. As long as your money is good, because this can get a bit pricey," Snake Eyes said the last part with flare and wiggled his fingers around as he took the chair to sit in.

Wallace eyed a curious looking stain on the couch's red fabric before he eased down on the very edge of the cushion.

"It's nice to meet you by the way. I'm Izumi Kobayashi, or the Forger, whichever you prefer," Snake Eyes, Izumi, said as he extended a bony hand to him.

Wallace shook it, reluctantly, and watched as Izumi's angular face filled with thin lines as he smiled. "Wallace," he replied. Something about Izumi's demeanor and the creases and folded of his face told Wallace he was a handful of years younger than the Forger.

"No last name?" Izumi asked as he withdrew back into his chair. "Well I suppose if you're here for a new identity you might have a reason for keeping that to yourself. I can respect that, Wally."

Wallace's own eyes became slitted and narrow, almost a mimicry of Izumi's. Only Andrew had ever called him Wally, and even then it was a rarity. "It's Wallace."

"Gotcha, Wally." Izumi grinned.

Wallace rolled his eyes and stood, ready to leave.

"Alright, alright. Sit down." Izumi stood too, at a speed that cautioned Wallace, and waved for him to sit back down. "We're just having fun, starting a dialogue, before we get to business. Relax, don't get your boxers in a twist. Unless of course you're a briefs man? Trunks? Comm–"

"I'd prefer if we just got to business," Wallace said over Izumi, his face hot, as he eased back onto his position perched at the end of the couch. But the question was, what exactly was his business here?

"Izumi slumped back into his seat and looked over his pad of paper. "Our standard is a new trainer ID or license, call it whatever you want. We'll put whatever name you want on it, register it to whatever region you want. If you want a new picture that's extra, but you look like you can afford it," he said as his eyes studied Wallace like Yellow Teeth's had. "But don't limit yourself. For some of our more _dire_ customers we offer new birth certificates and anything else you could think of. We'll build you up a new life so perfect they'd have to dig pretty deep to find the real you. They, of course, being whoever you're running from. I assume you're running from someone."

"How much?" Wallace asked.

"For all of that?" he asked. Izumi leaned back in the chair and fixed his slitted gaze on the ceiling. He began naming off services and dragging the pen through the air, calculating the prices. "The cost of a new trainer ID, 200,000. With a new photo that'll be an additional $30,000. Records to back up your new ID will be around115, 's make it a nice $120, registered to a region of your choosing, which, if it's not Kalos, is going to cost you a hefty $50,000, for a total of–" Izumi paused, his eyes opening wide as he waved his pen through the air in circles. "Wally, help me out. Math was never my thing. More of a history and humanities kind of guy."

"$515,000," Wallace said, already shrugging out of his backpack.

"Yes! Thank you. $515,000 and a wait time of four to five days," Izumi said as he started scribbling on his pad again.

"I need it by tomorrow," Wallace said and opened up the bag.

Izumi choked on his laughter and flicked his gaze up to Wallace. "Well that's very wishful thinking, but this stuff takes time and although we may look desolate around here, you're not our only customer. This city is filled with people like you who need to escape, so you'll be at the bottom of a very long list."

Wallace stood up and hovered over the coffee table as he began grabbing stacks of cash from his bag and stacked them on the desk, counting each stack as he went.

"Hi there," Izumi said, his voice dry and his eyes wide.

"I need it by tomorrow. I also need new clothes and a few other things," Wallace said as he gestured to the money. "That's $600,000 for you and your people if you can make it all happen."

Izumi's hungry eyes moved from the pile of money to Wallace before he shot up and clapped his hands. "Listen up losers, we've got a new assignment that I need all hands on desk with."

Wallace looked over his shoulder as Mohawk and Yellow Teeth lazily walked into the sitting area, their eyes fell to the pyramid of money on the table and then gaped at Wallace.

"You're going on a shopping trip for my dear friend, Wally," Izumi said, aiming a finger at Mohawk.

"Why me?" Mohawk said, but his eyes had fallen back to the cash.

Izumi grabbed one of the stacks of cash and hurled it at him. "That's why. Wally, make a list and he'll pick everything up for you," he said, tossing his pad and pen at Wallace. "Start writing."

Snatching the paper and pen out of the air Wallace sneered at Izumi before he sat back down. He re-zipped his bag, checking on the egg before he closed it completely. His eyes lifted to the stack of bills he'd lifted from his father's safe. As he rested the pad of paper on his knee Wallace hovered the pen above the page, contemplating everything he'd need to start over.

When he was done he handed the list over to Mohawk who glared at it before started laughing. "Seriously? Hair dye, scissors, cheap and plain t-shirts," Mohawk said. "The dye and scissors I get, I mean what kind of hair style is that?"

Wallace ran a protective hand through his hair. One of the many things he and his father never saw eye to eye on was his hair. It was longer than his father would have liked it to be, but their met in the middle by enlisting Andrew's help over the phone. Arlan then raided a salon for all the product he find to style Wallace's hair and make him presentable for business meetings. He hadn't bothered to do much of anything to it after his shower that morning and it fell limply around his face and ears.

"Yo, you know if you wanted some help with that," Yellow Teeth said and gestured to his hair. "I may be of some use here. I did my own hair, yo."

Wallace's eyes flicked up to the crowd of vibrant pink braids on Lillian's head. "Um."

"That's it, I'm doing it. I don't care." Yellow Teeth snatched the hair dye and scissors from Izumi's hands and latched a hand onto Wallace's shoulder. "Come into my office."

"Perfect," Izumi said with a clap of his hands. "You get him photo ready and you get to go shopping," he said to Mohawk who reluctantly trudged out of the shop.

Hours later Wallace stood in front of the only mirror in the shop admiring his hair. Yellow Teeth, who he learned was named Lillian, cut, dyed, and styled his hair until his usual dark blond coif was nothing more than a messy and uneven short dark mop on his head. Lillian had her own stock of hair supplies including dyes in the shop and although the box she used had some color of brown on it the result was something closer to black. There was barely an inch of his hair left all around and running his hand through it no longer felt soft, instead it was almost prickly and sharp.

After they took his picture and printed a new trainer license, Izumi crafted a new life for Wallace Peters from nothing. Wallace was born near Undella Town in Unova and was six months older than Wallace Pearce. Izumi created fake family members, an entry into Unova's trainer registry, logs that showed him visiting Pokémon Centers over Unova, as well as fake Pokémon in the Unova storage system.

When Mohawk, whose real name he learned was Sid, returned Wallace was watching a program reroute his money into the bank account they created for Wallace Peters. He briefly wondered if his father had done something similar. If he was to believe Andrew's final claim, that his father had been stealing money from his company's revenue it was likely he had secret accounts that 'laundered' the money, as Izumi put it.

While Wallace gathered up everything, Izumi promised to finish up the paperwork over night and have his new identity ready in the morning, and with a thank you to everyone for their help Wallace set out for home.

* * *

The following morning Wallace was thankful his father had meetings most of the day as he didn't feel up to explaining his drastic change in looks. In addition to his hair, Wallace tossed all his contacts and opted for a pair of black rimmed glasses he had hidden away as a backup. Aside from admiring his new look in the mirror, Wallace spent the morning researching Radix University, mostly for a means of transportation.

As the morning wore on he discovered that the university was situation northwest of Coumarine City in the once vacant waters of Azure Bay. He even searched through his father's employee files for Jason's contact information and got him to agree to take him through Route 16 to Coumarine in a few hours.

The hunger of not eating at all the day before finally caught up to Wallace and he ventured downstairs for a bowl of cereal as the doorbell rang. As he went to the door he checked a wall clock, Jason couldn't have come to get him, they agreed to meet at the gate in an hour.

Wallace nearly dropped his bowl when he opened the door and found Izumi standing on the other side, snake eyes fully squinted against the harsh sunlight. "What the hell are you doing here?" he barked as she shoved Izumi away from the door.

"Is that how you treat your friendly neighborhood forger, Wally?" Izumi asked as he rubbed his chest where Wallace had prodded him. "I just came to drop off the rest of your documentation. Or did you forget?" Izumi waved a manilla folder around in the air.

"I didn't forget," Wallace said as he snatched it out of Izumi's hands and cast his eyes around the avenue around them. "But I was going to come get it from your office, why are you here? How did you find me?" he asked, panic rising in his voice.

"I had Sid follow you home," Izumi said as he stepped back and glanced up the front of the townhouse. "How many floors is this place anyway?"

"He followed me?" Wallace asked. "Why would you do—"

Izumi held up a hand, giving Wallace pause. "Look kid, I know all the big movers and shakers in this city. Call it a potential client list. But I know who has the money to afford my services and we prepare for them in advance. So when you dropped that stack of cash on my lap yesterday it got me thinking. Who is this kid?" Izumi said as he walked back and forth in front of Wallace. "Actually, those were Sid's words. But we were all thinking it. Not everyday a teenager has that kind of money, unless its an undercover operation."

"You think I'm working with the police?" Wallace asked, his throat dry.

"At first, but you committed to it and changed my mind," Izumi said as he stopped his pacing. "So I had Sid follow you to figure out where you came from, literally. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my Wally was Wallace Pearce. Though I should have known, you really picked an unimaginative alias."

"Thanks for your input," Wallace said as he backed up into his house. "And thanks for the paperwork, but you need to go."

Izumi took a large step forward and slapped a hand against the door to stop Wallace from shutting it on him. "Not so fast. I didn't just come to play the role of the errand boy. I wanted to offer our security package."

"Security package." Wallace raised his brows eyes at the offer.

"Security against prying eyes," Izumi said with a shrug of his shoulders. "If someone like, the police, came along and poked around in our files they would find evidence of your transformation from Pearce to Peters. Did I mention how silly of a switch that is?"

"Get to the point please," Wallace said as he wondered if he could overpower Izumi and get the door shut.

"For an additional $5,000 we'll secure your records and make them top secret, high priority, to keep others from seeing them."

Even though just the idea of the police finding out made Wallace's palms sweat he tried to keep his voice steady. "Why would I care if the police saw?"

"Maybe you do, maybe you don't." Izumi shrugged. "But why take the chance?"

"I gave you $600,000, you're not getting any more," Wallace said as he moved to shut the door, succeeding until Izumi stuck his foot in the way.

"Well how about referrals?"

"Referrals?" Wallace asked, exasperatedly.

"Do you have any friends who may be in need of my services?" Izumi asked, sounding like a child.

"What is it with your and money?" Wallace asked. "$600,000. How can you still be after more?"

"$600,000 is what you paid the Forgery. Some of it went to buying everything on your list. Then I have to pay off people who completed your paperwork. What's left has to be split three ways between myself, Sid, and Lillian. We've all got bills and things that are past due." Izumi explained and shrugged his shoulders looking hapless. "What's left is barely enough for me to use."

"To use for what?" Wallace asked, his fiery attitude dying down.

"I don't help people make new lives for themselves out of the kindness of my heart," Izumi said. "I'm in it because it can be highly profitable and so I use it to fund my explorations."

Wallace looked the man up and down. Dressed in cream and beige colors Izumi looked like he was the one about to go sailing across Azure Bay, not the type to be exploring dungeons and caves. "What kind of explorations?"

"Let's keep it simple and just say I hunt legends, one in particular who is able to grant wishes," Izumi said. "That is what my explorations are for. Funding them is expensive, so in the meantime I'm working with Lillian and Sid, who are also in it for the money, but for less grand reasons. So if you know anyone who may need our help, would you send them our way? That's why I'm here."

"Good luck on looking for your genie pokémon, but don't know anyone who needs your help," Wallace said as he struggled to push the door closed.

"It's not a genie, it's—"

Wallace grunted as he pushed against the door with all his strength and knocked Izumi back before he slammed the door shut and flipped the lock. Looking at the folder in his hands Wallace knew he had everything he needed to start over. "Goodbye, Mr. Pearce."

* * *

End of Chapter Five

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Three character debuts this chapter, **Izumi Kobayashi;** **AltariaMotives** , and minor mentions of **Jason;** **Killer Memestar** , **and Detective Minako Fujioka;** **The Ruffler**.

I apologize for the recent gaps between chapters. While longer chapters aren't a problem to write I want to make sure the content is worth the read. I rewrote chapter four several times until I was satisfied and the response was great so I don't want to rush out a chapter only for it to be mediocre.

If you've been following the information releases for Sun & Moon which starter do you think you'll pick? Also, which version do you plan on getting? I've already put money down for the pre-order of Moon and while I usually always go for a water starter (except Totodile), Litten is definitely my pick. I mean, come on, it's lit!

 **Question of the Chapter #4:** With Andrew's traveling gear left behind and Charles saying he never saw him, do you believe Arlan has people convinced with his story?


	6. Breathe

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Six – Breathe**

 _What we call the beginning is often the end.  
And to make an end is to make a beginning. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace remained by his front door until he was sure Izumi had left and wouldn't be returning before he made his way back upstairs. He had no idea when his father was coming home, but he didn't have time to waste. Meetings or not, they were supposed give a statement regarding Andrew's disappearance later. and nothing would keep his father from that.

With the same amount of speed and determination he used when running from the police, Wallace began to pack. Only this time there was hardly anything in his room he wanted to bring. Instead, he packed everything in the shopping bags Sid brought to the Forgery. While he dumped the bags contents into his duffel, he realized just how differently he lived from the less fortunate, as his father referred to them. Gone were the days of designer pants, embroidered cardigans, and foreign shoes. Now his clothes consisted of off-the-rack t-shirts, faded jeans, off-brand tennis shoes, and a collection of plain cotton jackets. He was honestly surprised Sid managed to find such homey clothes, he could name a few places in Lumiose where just wearing any of it would get you kicked out on the street.

In between packing his duffel, Wallace phoned Jason who was waiting at a café near the gate to Route 16. After his bag was filled to the point the zipper barely closed, Wallace packed his backpack with the folder Izumi brought, his new trainer ID, and a handful of his own underwear and socks he used as a cushion for his egg. As he nestled the egg into the center of the bag he swore it moved in his hands.

After getting dressed, Wallace threw his pack and duffel straps over his shoulders and said goodbye to his townhouse, possibly for the last time, before he headed to meet Jason.

When he arrived at the connecting gate to Route 16, the sun was high with the promise of another hot August day, and Jason was there, moseying around the entrance with Lucario who had served as Wallace's bodyguard the day before. His first meeting with Jason happened at the Pearce Productions main office and Jason was swamped with paperwork at a desk that held dual monitors with his nose buried in a pile of books. None of it made Wallace very confident of Jason's abilities as a trainer. Even there, outside the office, he didn't look quite right with his pale skin, long limbs, and sunlight glinting off his hair the color of polished mahogany. But upon seeing Wallace, Jason proved himself by listing off some of the items he packed for their trap. His pack was twice the size of Wallace's and was stuffed full with snack food, water bottles, a tent, a couple of sleeping bags, and other camping essentials.

Together they headed into the gate, the interior of which was composed of light stone and held very few decorations, but was packed full of trainers. As they entered the small space they were ushered towards the information desk where the crowd tapered in even tighter.

"I hate this," Jason muttered so quietly Wallace barely heard it over the clamor inside.

Trainers were gathered in stacks along the walls as they argued with officers who seemed to be conducting brief interviews on people attempting to enter or exit Lumiose. A frazzled looking attendant stood behind a grey desk cluttered with paperwork and looked exasperated to see Jason and Wallace walk up. "Please take a form, fill it out, bring it back, and wait for an officer to speak with you," she said, as if she read it from a prompt.

Without wasting a second, Jason swung his bag onto the counter and pulled a folded up piece of paper from one of its side pockets. "I have a pass signed by Arlan Pearce for our travel in and out of Lumiose," he said as he unfolded the sheet for the attendant.

The woman's bug eyes skimmed over the paper before she pulled it from his hands. She laid it flat on the desk and brandished a large stamp that marked the paper with a large green check. "Show this to the officer at the exit. Have a nice day."

Considering they'd used the same paper yesterday to get into Lumiose Wallace wondered if the attendant realized, or cared, that the paper already had a check on it. As they moved towards the exit Wallace looked back at the chaos inside the gate. Antoinette had been right, the checkpoints would have taken forever to get through. As he and Jason made their way out of the gate and into the open air of Route 16, Wallace's thoughts drifted again, this time to Antoinette. Despite spending several days with her, on and off, he didn't know anything about her, only that she was probably glad to be rid of him. He imagined she'd rescued some other boy from certain death and was making him equally as uncomfortable.

"If you don't mind me asking, what's in Coumarine?" Jason asked while the line of trainers leaving the city thinned.

"A friend," Wallace answered quickly. There were boats leaving from Coumarine from Thursday to Sunday that would take students to the university. He planned out everything to be sure he was on one of those boats. "I wouldn't ask you along if I could get through by myself."

Jason waved it off as he handed their passage form the guard who merely glanced at it before he let them through. "Don't worry about it. I know the Badlands can be rough to get through without a Pokémon," Jason said. "No Gogoat today?"

"No, I was just borrowing it," Wallace said. He never got the chance to return Gogoat to the PC, instead he left it in Andrew's room with Andrew's team of pokémon, which seemed just as fitting. Wallace tugged on the straps of his backpack and felt the newly familiar weight of his egg. He didn't know much about Route 16, but from the pictures he'd seen online it seemed like quite the walk. Hopefully the egg would hatch on the way.

As soon as Wallace stepped out of the gate and into the Lumiose Badlands, he regretted wearing jeans, actually he regretted wearing anything at all. He and Jason emerged into a small clearing that led them up onto the plains of Route 16 that were made entirely of red clay and rock. It was mostly flat except for rock formations and cliffs that rose far in the distance which left little to no areas for trainers to find shade. But it was the blinding light and searing heat beating down on them that made it unbearable.

As he looked over at Jason, who was wandering ahead of him and surveying the land, he realized Jason had a better understanding of what they were getting themselves into. Aside from his pack, Jason had come only wearing jean shorts and a tank top.

"It's a lot to take in," Jason said from somewhere ahead of him, from his voice Wallace could tell he had moved farther away

Wallace opened his mouth to speak, but sucked in a mouth of heat that dried a patch on his tongue. As the heat worked its way to his lungs Wallace stretched out his chest, feeling as if someone had set fire to his upper torso. He squinted against the harsh sunlight and tried to find Jason, but the intense heat rising off the rock made the air quiver. In the distance a mountain ridge rose in a series of jagged peaks and to his surprise there were buildings, a cluster of them in front of the mountains. But besides that there were no hills or valleys, just rocks for as far as he could see.

While Wallace was still observing the wasteland, Jason trotted back over. "The good news is that it's a straight shot pretty much. No change we'll get lost, unless we turned around somehow," Jason said. "Are you alright?"

Wallace nodded and while bent at the waist, he fanned himself with the collar of his shirt. "F-Fine," he wheezed, finding it hard to breathe as he took in shallow breaths from his upper chest.

"Water?" Jason asked with a lopsided grin before he whipped a large blue water bottle out from the side of his pack. "Here."

"No. Don't we need to save it?" Despite refusing it, Wallace let his eyes linger on the crystal blue bottle that dripped with condensation. His Adam's Apple bobbed as a single droplet fell from the bottle and sizzled against the clay.

Jason laughed and thrust the bottle at him. "I have more, and I don't think we'll run out before we reach the city."

Wallace's throat dilated in anticipation as he grabbed the bottle and unscrewed the cap. He brought it to his nose and inhaled. He knew people said water had no smell or waste, but in that moment it smelled clean, and the cold scent instantly soothed him. He took a long swig and let the water roll around in his mouth until it turned warm before he swallowed it down. He could have drunk the entire bottle, but forced himself to pull away and pushed it back into Jason's hands. It wouldn't last very long if he was in charge of holding it.

After Jason secured the bottle, the two of them, with Lucario standing dutifully at Wallace's side, set off. "How long do you think this will take?" Wallace asked, sounding a bit whiny.

"It's definitely can be done in a day," Jason said with his head tipped to the sky. "But it all depends on our pace. I don't want you pushing yourself, Mr. Pearce."

"Just Wallace is fine," he said. The sooner he shed his last name the better. "Wouldn't it be smarter to get across faster rather than spending longer out here?" Wallace turned and looked back, it seemed like they'd only been walking for only a minute, but there was no sign of the connecting gate behind them and Lumiose was nothing more than a clumped wall of buildings in the distance.

Jason shrugged, his pack jumping on his back. "It's alright if we take our time. It'll be easier to travel at night, except for when it gets cold. But it's not a problem if we have to sleep out here. I brought sleeping bags and we might be able to find some some dried bramble twigs to make a small fire."

"What about wild pokémon?" Wallace asked, the thought just occurring to him as he shielded his face. The wind picked up and created small wisps of dust on the ground that swirled and gathered into tiny clouds that seemed to move independently of the wind.

"We should be alright, not much lives out here that will bother us. Maybe some trapinch," Jason said.

Jason sounded too casual for Wallace's taste as he suddenly wasn't keen on the idea of sleeping on the ground around a pokémon with the word pinch in its name, whatever a trapinch was.

"Would you like to catch a pokémon?" Jason asked as he turned and started walking backwards. "There's not much, mostly Ground-types, but I could help if you want. I've got plenty of Poké Balls, all you have to do is throw it at them."

"Don't you have to weaken them first?" Wallace asked, surely he read that in a book somewhere.

"Sure, but Lucario and I will take care of that," Jason said with a bob of his head.

Wallace glanced over his shoulder at Lucario who seemed to be smiling in anticipation. "Carr!" he barked.

Through much reluctance, Wallace agreed. While Lucario switched his position to the vanguard, to be the first to spot any pokémon, Jason walked alongside Wallace and explained the mechanics of a Poké Ball. Wallace feigned interest as Jason went on about space-time distortion, pocket dimensions, wormholes, and containment data. It was a little known secret that Arlan's next venture was to create his own line of Poké Balls that would promise a higher catch rate than anything else on the market. Many of the meetings his father held in recent months were all with developers at a factory in Laverre City to create a prototype. Although the business deal technically had nothing to do with him, Wallace was still forced to pour over his father's notes on the subject, and Jason's explanation sounded like an abridged version.

Hours passed and they had come cross just about everything the Lumiose Badlands had to offer. While Wallace got the hang at identifying pokémon by their cry and appearance, catching them was another story. Lucario had no problem beating up on the various Ground-types they discovered, Wallace turned out to have a lousy throwing arm. Each Poké Ball Jason lent him struck an object far away from the pokémon, who in Wallace's defense, even though they were weak and wounded, were still moving targets.

By the time Jason's last Poké Ball soared over the head of a dugtrio and bounced harmlessly into a ditch, Wallace's arm and shoulder were sore and his pride was equally wounded. The dugtrio took the opportunity to burrow underground before Lucario pounced on the spot and began searching under its paws for the missing pokémon.

"It's gone buddy," Jason said.

"Carr..." Lucario snorted, disappointed, before he cast an uneasy look at Wallace.

Wallace shrugged before he wiped sweat from his brow. "Sorry for wasting all those Poké Balls."

Despite Wallace literally throwing away over $1,000 worth of merchandise, Jason seemed like his normal jovial self. Which was something that didn't fade as they made their way across the the rest of the Route. Traveling with Jason proved to be an interesting experience as nothing about the Badlands bother him. He seemed used to the heat and the unrelenting sun, he shielded his eyes from dust clouds without much regard, and easily commanded Lucario to defend them from wild pokémon that often tried to ambush them. Perhaps most surprisingly, he didn't seem to mind Wallace's occasional gripe or his slow pace.

They'd just maneuvered past a series of railings and endured an intense, but brief, gush of wind and sand when Wallace spotted a flight of steps that led up to a connecting gate. "Finally," he said once he saw Jason slow to a stop. His thighs and calves were screaming; his face was slick with sweat, his mouth parched, and his shirt glued to his chest. Wallace dropped into a squat and used the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face.

"Lucario, you did a great job protecting our new friend, thank you." Jason shrugged off his backpack and dug around inside until he pulled out a bag of what looked like treats.

As Lucario trotted over, Wallace raised his brows skeptically at Jason's use of the word 'friend', but pushed the thought aside as he watched him feed Lucario from his hands. He thought back to Gogoat, who hadn't even acknowledged he was there when he first released it, and as they typically did, his thoughts turned to Andrew. Had Gogoat ignored him because he wasn't its owner? He wondered what kind of relationship Andrew had with his pokémon and again was reminded of the grim fact that Andrew had boxes filled with pokémon that would never see their owner again.

Wallace blinked and Jason was standing over him, hand outstretched. Lucario was no where in sight, recalled into his Poké Ball he figured. Wallace took Jason's hand and was hoisted up, against the protests of his legs, and they headed towards the gate.

"Just where do you think you're going?"

Wallace froze and watched as Jason seemed to waver in his decision to stop before he turned and glared against the sun. Wallace turned too, half expecting it to be his father or maybe the officer that waved them through the gate, but instead there was a boy.

Stick thin, and dressed about as well as Wallace was for being in a desiccated wasteland, the wind attempted to blow him over while making his open jacket flap exuberantly. His skin was extremely pale, a wonder the sun wasn't burning him white hot, and stood posed in a t-shirt, pants that hung off his hips, and slippers that were dirtied with red clay dust.

"I spent considerable time observing and documenting the pattern of movement created by the pokémon found along Route 16. Not to mention the fascinating discoveries I uncovered regarding the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by the nearby Power Plant," the boy said as he walked towards Wallace and Jason with a confident stride, he didn't seem affected by the strong wind. "I could practically taste it! I was so close to a breakthrough on the effects the wavelengths have on pokémon, when you two interrupted my research. There are consequences for your actions, gentlemen."

Wallace squinted at the boy, who as he came closer, Wallace realized had to be around his own age. "Is this happening or am I having a heat stroke?" Wallace asked.

The boy swung his arm up, revealing a white tablet attached to his forearm, and tapped the screen. "2.44 seconds," he said. "What is your name?"

Wallace's face twisted like he'd swallowed a whole lemon. "I'm not telling you my name."

The boy sighed and nudged a pair of red rimmed glasses on his nose with his finger. "You're going to make me complete this log entry with insufficient data?" he asked, his stare hardening. He suddenly reached up to his hair, a mixture of light and dark brown, and pinched a section of it between his fingers and started to twist it.

"We're sorry if we ruined your experiment. Are you one of Professor Sycamore's aides?" Jason asked, more calmly than Wallace felt this odd stranger deserved.

"3.51 seconds." The boy scoffed out a laugh as he tapped on his tablet again. "Don't insult me. Conducting research within the four walls of a laboratory all day? Why don't you lock me in a room to watch paint dry? Or have me observe a glass of water to calculate the rate of evaporation instead?

"Alright, sorry." Jason laughed and scratched at the back of his head. "Anyway, nice to meet you. I'm Jason Bahr, and this is my friend, Wallace."

Again with the F word, Wallace thought, uneasy now that the stranger knew his name.

"Jason and Wallace, noted." The boy glared at the two of them before he turned his attention back to his tablet, furiously typing something against the touchscreen. "My name is Neo Spring."

"Nice to meet you, Neo, are you heading to Coumarine City?" Jason asked, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb. "Do you want to walk with us?"

"I was on my way there, yes." Neo pushed his glasses back up his nose before he tipped his head to them. "But had time to study the wildlife until you two interrupted that. Now my data is useless and I'm feeling quite frazzled." Neo's hand vanished behind his back and remerged with an enlarged Poké Ball at the ready. "Indulge me in a battle as a way of apologizing for tramping through and disrupting my work!"

"I guess a battle wouldn't hurt," Jason said as he shrugged off his pack. "Wallace, do you mind?" he asked, but was already digging around in his bag.

"Uh, no," Wallace said as he began to back away. How much space was required for a battle if he didn't want to get caught in the crossfire?

Jason looked over the handful of Poké Balls in his grasp and Wallace wondered how he was able to tell which pokémon were inside of which. But with a supreme amount of confidence, Jason stood and hurled out a ball that looked like all the others. "Go, Ferroseed," he called out as the Poké Ball broke open in mid-air.

Wallace watched a light, that looked dim compared to the Badland's sunlight, release a green and grey hunk of metal that hit the ground with a solid thud. The pokémon spun around on its axis and let out a cry mechanical sounding cry. Wallace had to shield his eyes from the sun that glinted off Ferroseed's body, but when he looked to Neo he found that the boy didn't seem phased.

"Being a Unova native, I'm quite disappointed in your selection. The pokémon I discovered along this route were equally disappointing. This being my first time in the Kalos region I was hoping to gather information on more exotic species." Neo bobbed his head up and down as he typed away on his arm tablet.

"Aren't you going to bring out a pokémon? What are you doing?" Jason asked.

"I'm calculating for the degree of Ferroseed's luster," Neo said. "And now, after I'd added in the length and sharpness of its thorns, I can infer you've only recently come to own it."

"It was a gift actually, from my parents, I hatched it from an egg before I moved to Kalos," Jason said, looking down at Ferroseed with a smile.

Wallace tugged on the straps of his backpack, as he found himself doing often, to make sure the weight of his egg was still there. Would Jason know how long eggs took to hatch?

"However you came to own it, I've already created a list of its possible moves." Neo grinned at his tablet as he swiped at the screen and began typing again. "And by putting all this information together I've come to the decision that I will not be battling you," he said as he miniaturized his Poké Ball.

"Why not?" Jason asked.

"That was anti-climatic," Wallace groaned after putting several yards between him and Jason.

"I enjoy utilizing every aspect of battle to claim victory, but even a unexperienced trainer could win against your Ferroseed." Neo shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "This battle would not allow me to show my strengths and winning would only prove I possess a basic understand of type advantages. And if that's all I'm good for, I don't deserve to attend the most prestigious university in this region."

"University?" Wallace asked, his interest whetted.

Neo turned his steely glare to Wallace and nodded. "Yes. I'm hoping to enhance the skills I already possess and surpass everyone by creating a new style of trainer life. One where technology and pokémon are used harmoniously and individuals with brilliance and minds like mine aren't limited to the standards and expectations previously set upon the world we live in." Neo turned his eyes on Ferroseed, who sat motionlessly in the ground, and then to Jason. "My observations tell me you are not an attending student."

"I'm an IT worker for Pearce Productions." Jason shook his head and tossed Ferroseed's ball up and down.

Neo's brows raised as he pulled down his glasses as if he were seeing Jason for the first time. "You expect me to believe you are employed for the most innovative company in the world?"

"You don't have to, but it's the truth," Jason said, followed by a nervous laugh.

"Fascinating," Neo said as he enlarged his Poké Ball again. "I've decided I will battle you. Although I do not wish to sit behind a desk for the remainder of my life, a career with Pearce Productions is tantalizing. I'll consider victory over you the next best thing, to prove that such a career is beneath me!"

"If that's what it takes for you to battle me, I'll take it! !" Jason cried out, clenching his fists.

"Prepare for defeat," Neo said. He enlarged the Poké Ball and let it Poké Ball roll off his hand to the ground. "Burn him down, Lampent!"

Wallace watched another weak glint of light release a pokémon, much different than Ferroseed. Its head was spherical and transparent with two pale yellow eyes and a blue-purple flame inside. Its body was dark with a black spiked bottom that stretched into two willowy arms and what Wallace could only guess was a lampshade on top.

"Oh," Jason said, his eyes flicking down to Ferroseed who still hadn't moved. "You okay, Ferroseed?"

Ferroseed nudged slightly in the ground, its thorns etching a groove into the clay. "Ferr."

"Your Ferroseed seems to be rather unemotional," Neo said. "Is that evidence of a poor relationship between trainer and pokémon? Are you training it properly? No matter, this victory is mine. Lampent, start and finish this immediately an inferno!"

Lampent let out a squee of a cry, and as it twirled in the air two blue flames ignited on the tips of its arms. Lampent brought the flames together above its head before it tipped in Ferroseed's direction and the space in front of Lampent exploded with light and heat.

"Gyro ball, Ferroseed!"

Ferroseed popped out of the ground and began to rotate, slowly at first, before a flicker of blue light haloed its ovoid body and it hit the ground. Wallace listened as Ferroseed made a wide loop around their makeshift battlefield, to the sound of its thorns piercing the clay for traction like spikes on an athlete's shoe. Meanwhile, Lampent's inferno cannon blazed across the wasteland, its heat drying Wallace's eyes even from his distance.

"Speed, I see," Neo said with an unimpressed shrug before he tapped away on his tablet. "But it won't save you. Lampent, capture it with telekinesis."

"Laa!" In time with Lampent's cry, an emerald green light outlined its body. Ferroseed slowed to a stop as the light enveloped it as well and it levitated into the air.

"Point-blank inferno, Lampent!" Neo called out with a dramatic wave of his hands.

"Ferroseed, latch yourself to Lampent with leech seed," Jason said. "Then get yourself back on the ground with ingrain!"

Several of the green thorns that protruded from Ferroseed's body shot free and struck Lampent, each sprouting a bounty of green vines that connected the two pokémon. Lampent seemed unaffected as it lit two flames at the ends of its arms and brought them together above its head. More of Ferroseed's thorns shot from its body, this time aimed at the clay. The thorns stuck fast and the connecting vines pulled Ferroseed out of the air and yanked the connected Lampent down with it.

"How foolish," Neo said as he adjusted his glasses. "Did you think that close contact would give me pause in executing my attack? The blowback created from Lampent's inferno won't damage Lampent at all; however, at point-blank range it will destroy your Ferroseed. Lampent, go!"

With the blue flame flickering above its head, Lampent attempted to angle itself to fire at Ferroseed, but pressed against the other pokémon, Lampent was unable to move and only managed to wiggle back and forth. Wallace watched with wide eyes as the air above Lampent wavered with the intensity of heat before its inferno fired harmlessly into the sky.

Jason looked pleased as Ferroseed pulsated with a green light, more natural and earthy, than the one caused by Lampent's earlier attack. "Go ahead and use another gyro ball!"

Ferroseed hummed in response before it rolled, taking Lampent with it, and ground down into the clay, the remaining barbs on its body digging and slicing against Lampent's body. Ferroseed picked up speed and the two pokémon blurred into nothing but colors as Ferroseed burrowed them into the ground.

"Nice work, Ferroseed," Jason said.

Neo pushed up his glasses and twisted a strand of his hair while he looked at his tablet. "Using Ferroseed's ability, Iron Barbs, to cause additional damage to Lampent, how interesting," he said. "But of course, Lampent has an ability too."

Lampent lifted back into the air, still coated in Ferroseed's leeching vines, and wavered slightly after the attack. From his distance, Wallace could see slight scratches and scuff marks that lined Lampent's lower body. Ferroseed, on the other hand, seemed perfectly fine as it launched itself out of the ground. Aside from the fact that many of its thorns were missing, its body glowed with a pulse of light every few seconds until some of its remaining thorns dropped off its body and sizzled against the clay before they broke apart and patches of grass spread from them.

"What's wrong with it?" Wallace asked. He strained his eyes at Ferroseed and noticed an oblong patch along the pokémon back that seemed warped and shiny, the thorns around it a darker color than the rest and the scent of something burning was becoming heavier in the air.

"Lampent's ability, Flame Body, burned Ferroseed at the same time Ferroseed's ability harmed Lampent," Neo held his hands out and shrugged. "The scales of battle I suppose, but I'm being modest. This is all going according to plan. I planned on burning Ferroseed from the beginning and calculated that Ferroseed specialized in physical moves, which only increased my odds of burning it. Lampent, use hex!"

Lampent's arms wavered before they flew up above its head and glowed with a dusky purple light. Wallace watched in awe as the lights darkened and formed a sort of eye above Lampent that glared, an angry red, at Ferroseed.

"Ferroseed, get out of there!" Jason yelled, seemingly a second too late.

Lampent's ethereal eye glowed before its light coated Ferroseed and hoisted it from the ground again. Like before, when at the mercy of Lampent's telekinesis, Ferroseed could do nothing while held in mid-air, not even the vines connecting it to the ground helped it. Wallace's eyes focused on the discolored and warped patch on Ferroseed's back as Lampent's hex light intensified around the spot and a murky black haze wafted off it. Ferroseed jerked about in the air before it started to cry out, sounding like shards of glass going at full speed inside a blender, as its burn area widened.

"Even with leech seed and ingrain I'm afraid it won't be enough. Inferno!" Neo commanded.

Wallace's eyes darted back to Neo and Lampent who already had its flame ready and tipped forward to Ferroseed, who hovered helplessly into Lampent's range. Jason grabbed Ferroseed's Poké Ball and stretched his arm out to recall it, but Lampent fired first.

The familiar cannon of blue fire shot from the tip of Lampent's head and struck Ferroseed dead on, the thorn seed pokémon's cries were lost under the raging sound of the blaze. Released from hex, Ferroseed's body exploded out of Lampent's attack, bouncing and rolling across the ground. Wallace ran to Jason's side and the two of them headed to Ferroseed who rolled to a stop several yards away. Its body glowed red hot and all of its thorns were gone, the holes on its body billowing out black smoke. Ferroseed's eyes were shut tight and its mouth hung open, but Jason didn't seem too moved, only recalling Ferroseed and whispering something to the Poké Ball.

"I would say that was an excellent battle, but that would imply you putting up a challenge," Neo said as he recalled Lampent and began typing away on his tablet. "Regardless, my research here is finished, I've had my battle, so I will be heading to Coumarine now. You two are welcome to follow, and I suggest you do as your Ferroseed will need emergency treatment for those severe burns."

Wallace watched Neo as strode past them and up the flight of stairs towards the gate. "Is Ferroseed going to be okay? It looked –" Dead, he wanted to say, but kept it to himself.

Jason stood and threw his backpack on. "He's right, we should go. I don't have any burn heals, and Ferroseed needs professional treatment. He'll be alright if we hurry."

Wallace followed along behind Jason who walked at a hurried pace up the steps to the gate, clutching Ferroseed's Poké Ball the entire time. The connecting gate, much quieter than the previous, led them out into half of a city that was built in tiers upon cliffs that dropped off into the ocean. Wallace followed Jason to the Pokémon Center, but didn't follow him inside.

"Are you taking the monorail?" Jason asked as they stood on opposite sides of the entrance door to the Pokémon Center.

"Uh, yes," Wallace said, unsure. His eyes found Neo waiting in a line outside a nearby building and the end of a train car in the gap between the two buildings. "I guess this is goodbye, thank you for bringing me."

"My pleasure," Jason smiled.

Wallace waited for a moment until the awkward silence became too much to bear and he started walking away before a thought occurred to him. "Jason, if my father asks about me. Could you tell him I decided to leave for my trip a little early? He'll know what it means."

"Oh, sure, no problem," Jason said as he paused in the doorway. "Enjoy yourself, Wallace."

"Have a safe trip back." Wallace waved bye and walked the short distance to the Hillcrest Station, as the sign read. He filed in behind Neo who was busy tapping away on his tablet.

"Well, Wallace Peters, it seems we'll be classmates," Neo said without taking his eyes off his device.

"How do you know my name?" Wallace asked, startled.

Neo turned and held out his tablet and allowed Wallace to see a long list of names, of which his rested somewhere near the middle. "I've downloaded the entire first year roster for Radix University. When your friend said your name I checked the database and found only one Wallace. Of course that didn't mean it had to be you, but your reaction just verified my suspicions. For your sake, I hope you battle better than your traveling partner," Neo said as they moved up in line.

He didn't bother answering. Neo would probably have a good laugh if he learned Wallace couldn't even throw a Poké Ball straight, let alone had no experience in battling.

The inside of the station was a small lobby filled with workers who were quickly checking tickets and waving passengers through. Wallace kept glancing around to other passengers, all were pulling out money and tickets to present, but he had nothing and Neo didn't seem concerned either.

When it was their turn in line Neo spoke up for both of them. "We're students of Radix University, traveling to the Seaside Station to dock the boats heading to the university," he said, again focusing solely on his tablet.

The attendant nodded and waved them through. Wallace quickly follow after Neo through a narrow doorway that led them directly to the boarding platform and onto the monorail. Despite not actually liking Neo, Wallace found himself attached to the boy as they found seats near the middle of the train.

The train left the station after a few more minutes of boarding, and during their brief ride Wallace listened to Neo rattle off facts about Lampent and about the university. Neo was in the middle of recounting the biography of Radix's first president when the monorail pulled into the station. Wallace jerked forward in his seat at the jutting motion the locomotive made upon stopping and the speakers positioned above the seats cracked to life.

"Passengers, we have reached our destination, the Seaside Station. Please collect your belongings and depart the train at your nearest exit. Thank you."

The conductor's voice vanished and the travelers stretched from their seats as they gathered up their carry-ons and shuffled towards the parting doors.

While waiting for the passengers behind him to exit, for his own peace of mind, Wallace unzipped the backpack in his lap and did a quick check on the contents. His egg was fine, still an egg though, he briefly wondered if Andrew had been lying about doing most of the work to get it to hatch. He then focused on the manilla folder as he slid his hand into the bag to ensure it didn't get bent during the trip. For added measure, he peered inside the file and flipped through the collection of papers inside, making sure everything that had been there when he left home was still there. Everything he needed to start over was inside the bag.

He peered at a small card inside the folder with his new picture and name on it. Wallace Pearce was gone, but life was just starting for Wallace Peters. He frowned, wonderful briefly if Izumi had been right about choosing a name that was more drastically different. But maybe his new appearance was all he needed, or maybe it didn't matter at all, seeing as Jason never bothered to mention it. The possibilities made his stomach churn as he wondered just how anonymous he was outside Lumiose City.

"How interesting."

Wallace's head shot up to see Neo hovering over his lap. He had his glasses resting on top of his head and his pale green eyes were wide and alive with curiosity as he practically salivated over the pokémon egg.

"May I see it?" he asked, his fingers wiggling madly.

"Excuse me, gentlemen."

Wallace looked over and the train's conductor was standing beside their seat. He was very primate-like, with light skin and a wide mouth with his lips pulled tight over his oversized teeth. "We're about to begin boarding to make our return trip. Unless you've purchased a round-trip ticket you'll need to depart." he said politely, but impatiently.

Wallace's gaze lowered to the rest of the train, all the passengers had cleared out, he and Neo were the only ones remaining. "Oh," he said before he shook away his thoughts and looked down to his bag. "I'm sorry." Wallace quickly zipped up his pack, grabbed his duffel, and stood.

"No worries, have a nice day."

Wallace turned to reply to the man, but saw he was already shuffling down the rest of the train car, checking for any stowaways. Neo followed him and he stepped off the train and into the Seaside Station. There, he let Neo lead the way again, as it seemed he had already done all the research regarding actually getting to the university. He led them around the northern part of Coumarine City, past merchants and vendors who set up stands near the dock, and towards the harbor where a small fleet of speedboats were waiting.

Word of mouth was all they needed to gain admittance, as the men and women waiting there had papers with their names on them, and Neo and Wallace were ushered into boat with one other student and soon they were off, speeding away from Coumarine and towards the open waters adjacent to Azure Bay.

* * *

Built on man-made islands – composed of sand, stone, and artificial reefs – located in the once sparse Azure Bay, there was now a compact, and yet sprawling, campus wild with Kalosian architecture. Where there had once been a large cave in open water there was now the campus centerpiece; a fountain that flanked the north-south walkway. Trees, flower beds, benches, cascades that spilled from sitting ledges, and vertical water jets all set in a stone-paved plaza. The campus boasted many attractions like arenas of clay and grass. And outdoor eating areas, with seating arranged in concentric circles. And a turf stadium, bordered by rising stands. Amidst all this was a school, too, sixty acres of red brick and glass made up the region's most acclaimed university.

Fresh off the boat from Coumarine City, Wallace and Neo were making their way through all of this. Walking from Remembrance Gateway to center of campus, Wallace tried to look like he belonged there, while trying not to lose sight of their group. After getting off the boat Neo and Wallace were grouped together with the other incoming students and were given a student guide that led them through the campus. The walkway passed a library before it split into four separate paths. Wallace and Neo ended up at the back of their group, trailing behind other students as they followed the guide who walked along a path that cut out diagonally to the left.

The path took them past three buildings, a religious center, a dormitory, and a performance hall that sat opposite the dorm. Passing the fountain, Wallace noticed the stones under his feet were laser-cut with names and dates.

It was still early that August day, that Wallace's group was led across a visitor parking lot and into the courtyard of a dormitory in the shape of a giant H. Although he doubted the guide would remember him, Wallace certainly knew who he was. His badge said Kolton, and the name wrung a bell as the student he spoke to on the phone at the Hotel Camphrier, the one he'd pissed off with his urging to get him enrolled. He was thankful the students weren't given name tags to wear as Kolton launched into an explanation of the dorms.

"First years stay here," Kolton said, sounding a little nervous, as he gestured weakly to the small courtyard in front of the dormitory.

The court was covered in light brown stone and had its own small garden in front of a line of bike racks and benches. Wallace's group stood inside the lower section of the H and were surrounded by three walls, two of which were spaced with rectangular windows to bedrooms, while the third wall, the one they faced, was entirely glass and showed a view of a common room.

"Inside it's broken up into three separate halls which are based off your majors. There's Iris Hall for coordinators and performers, Calone Hall for battlers, and Oak Hall for our research and breeding majors. Students sometimes abbreviate and call it the ICO, but the building's actual name is Civet Complex. This is where most of our first year students stay, but at times it gets overcrowded and some manage to get bumped up into the second year dorm."

Kolton weakly raised his arm and gestured behind the crowd of students. Behind them was a turnaround parking lot, but on the other side was another red brick dorm building, one that sat adjacent to the fountains. "That's the second year dorm, Rose-Absolute Hall. Like your dorm it's broken up into separate halls for the majors. And our upperclassmen stay a bit further away from here on the other side of campus in Vetiver Hall. But because it's only Thursday and classes don't start until Monday, you'll have plenty of time to explore campus on your own. Follow me."

Kolton led the group up the short flight of stairs to the door of the Civet Complex and waved his wallet in front of a card reader that lit up green. He held the door and the group of two dozen or so students filed into a lounge. A bored looking man sat behind an information desk, his neck craned back as he watched a wall mounted television. Aside from the desk, the room had a collection of couches and armchairs arranged in a square around a long and low coffee table. Bulletin boards were tacked up and vending machines hummed against a far wall.

Kolton waved and pointed to each feature of the lounge as he moved to the front of the group and led them to another door and a flight of stairs that led to a basement. "This is where we part," he said. "Like I said, the halls you'll stay in are divided up based on your major. This is done to ensure you live in quarters of like-minded students. If you're undecided, you had the option of selecting which hall you'd like and the university would have done its part to fulfill that wish for you. If your major is coordination or performance your halls are located on the right side of this building," Kolton said, his voice growing thin as he waved his arm in that direction. "Coordination majors take up the basement and first floors. Performance majors live on the first and second floors. Follow the halls and you'll meet up with your resident advisors who will separate you and get you settled in."

Wallace watched as students began breaking apart from the group and either taking the flight of steps down or heading through the door ahead of them and veering to the right.

"Everyone left should either be a battle, breeding, or research major, or undecided maybe. Breeding majors live on the second and third floors, right side. Research majors take up the first and second floors of the complex on the left side and battle majors take up the second and third floors on the same side. Head through the door, hang a left or a right, and you'll meet up with your resident advisors who will take you from there," Kolton said.

"Wallace, what is your major?" Neo asked as he tapped away on his tablet, mindlessly following the small group of students heading through the door in the lounge. "There is no record of your choice in the database."

His enrollment was last minute and he recalled the woman he spoke to on the phone saying he'd have to take whatever was available which meant whatever room was left vacant most likely. As he followed the students around the corner towards the left side of the building with brightly colored walls, he wondered if his room would be on the opposite side.

Their group met up with a slightly overweight upperclassman, whose name Wallace couldn't pronounce, who further split them up after checking off their names on a clipboard. As it turned out Wallace had snagged a room in Calone Hall for trainers, but was separated from Neo who had a room on the second floor. Wallace climbed the steps all the way to the third floor, practically alone as almost everyone had rooms below him, and searched for room number 313.

Wallace found his room past an empty hallway that the stairs led to, and off to the left, several doors down the hall and across from the bathroom. Using the key the upperclassman gave him, Wallace unlocked the door and stepped into the most depressing room he'd ever seen.

It was a double, with two wire frame beds with only a flimsy blue mattress on each. One bed sat adjacent to him on the same wall as the door and the other was pressed against the opposite wall. Between the beds were two wooden desks with a shelf rested on top of both. To his left stood a large wooden set that held two closets and a dresser in the middle with a built in mirror.

The floor was tile, a dingy red-brown, and the brick walls were a painted an off-white that matched the ceiling and pull down shades over the windows. It was stiflingly hot inside and even just standing in the doorway Wallace felt beads of sweat forming on his skin. The room's heat wasn't like the heat of the Badlands, it was heat mixed with dust and stale air that had been trapped inside the room with no exit, likely all summer long.

Since the choice was his to make, he decided to take the side of the room that had the windows. There were three of them, all rectangular in shape. Two sat in the wall above the bed and all had sills wide enough to rest items on. Wallace yanked on the shades and they rolled and flapped up towards the ceiling, flooding the room with sunlight. It only made the room slightly less bleak.

Shrugging his duffel off onto the floor, Wallace eased down on the mattress that seemed to deflate under his weight. He settled down near the center and listened to the unpleasant creak and whine of the frame's springs. He cast his eyes upon the room again, unsure of what his expectations were, when a thought occurred to him. If Jason didn't seem to care about his recent change in appearance, maybe it wasn't as good a disguise as he thought.

Wallace pulled his phone out and searched online for himself. Of course there were no websites or links to him, most were lookup sites that searched for people's addresses, but his stomach clenched in fear as he clicked the tab that said IMAGES. Rows of boxes loaded, all filled with pictures of various men, and a surprising number of women. As he scrolled, Wallace scanned each photo looking for himself, or the old him rather, but after reaching the bottom of several pages, he was nearly sure his presence in the digital world was about as significant as his presence in the real world. He clicked back to the main image page and gave the pictures another once over and paused on a horizontal picture of a group of men in business suits.

Something about the picture echoed in his memory and as he clicked it, he knew why. It was a business conference his father had hosted years ago in Sinnoh as part of a promotional tour for one of PokéView's new features. He enlarged the photo to the point it was grainy and scanned the faces in the rows of men. He found his father, Professor Rowan, and various businessmen before he spotted himself in the far lefthand corner. It was a long shot that someone would find it and be able to identify him, but he didn't take the chance as he brought up a list of options and thumbed the one that said REPORT IMAGE.

Wallace filled out a claim ticket for finding the image inappropriate and wanting it taken down, citing several outrageous reasons, until he was satisfied and sent the report.

With his mind at ease, Wallace placed his phone in his lap and leaned back on the bed and tried to enjoy the sight of his dorm room, a room that would be his for the foreseeable future. As he thought about what he'd need to buy for his classes, his phone buzzed. He hoped it was the website saying they would take down the image, but instead he was greeted by the message: **I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER**.

The phone nearly slipped through his fingers as Wallace's entire body turned to jelly. His throat tightened and his fingers jittered over the screen as another message came through with the same text as the first. **I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER**. Wallace remembered to breathe as he clicked away the message and attempted to see who had sent it when another came through. **I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER**. His chest puffed and deflated with quick intakes of air as he closed the message and tried to click on his message app to view the texts there, but was interrupted as another came through. **I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER.**

Wallace grunted as he furiously closed the message and stood, quickly trying to open his app, when the same message popped up on his screen. I **KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER**. His thumb hovered above the button to close the message, but before he could press it his phone buzzed. **I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER**. Wallace watched as message after message came through, each time his phone vibrated in his hands, rattling his bones.

Gritting his teeth, Wallace began clicking away each message as it popped up, but they never stopped coming. The breaks between messages became shorter as message after message buzzed through his phone, the screen freezing occasionally, unable to keep up, and the device suddenly felt very hot to his skin. **I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID THIS SUMMER.**

Wallace let his fingers fall away from the screen as the device continued to vibrate without signs of stopping. As the messages continued to come, their incoming buzz fell out of sync with the message appearing on his screen. Soon the texts were appearing instantly and often overlapping each other and the entire phone quivered in his palm.

Wallace hurled his phone and it smacked the wall with a satsifying _crack_ before it landed on the bed, still buzzing. He stepped away from the bed and turned to run, but before he could take a single step he collided with someone. There was a small gasp of air before the person stumbled back and fell to the floor.

"Oh!" Wallace choked out.

A thin boy with a mop of buff hair over his eyes craned his neck back to look up at Wallace. He jerked his head to the side, causing his bangs to lay flat and partially cover one of his blue eyes, an intense mixture of ice and electricity. "I was—I probably deserved that..."

Wallace furrowed his brow at the boy's response before he took his hands and helped him stand. "No, I wasn't paying attention," Wallace said and looked back to find his phone had gone black, the messages must have stopped coming.

"N-No, I'm sorry, that's my fault." The boy pointed to the phone before he brushed his hair to the side, though it did nothing to change its appearance.

"Your fault?" Wallace asked, an edge in his voice. "What did you do to my phone?"

The boy seemed to shrink in that moment and shy away from Wallace. "I-It's nothing, I just—my friend, Mag, he's able to send signals and make text through phones."

"Mag?" Wallace asked.

"Short for magnemite," he said with a weak shrug.

"Why me?" Wallace asked.

"It wasn't on purpose, I promise! Mag just does it sometimes," he said as he craned his neck around to scan the room. "I can't find it either."

While the boy observed the room, Wallace observed him. He wasn't much taller than Wallace, dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans that looked a size too big and a mustard yellow shirt. "Sorry for yelling at you," Wallace said. "I'm just a little on edge today. I'm Wallace by the way," he said as he stuck his hand out.

Garret looked down at Wallace's hand like it might bite before he weakly shook it.

"What?" Wallace asked as he too looked at his hand.

"N-Nothing, I guess there must have been a room change. I was expecting someone else as my roommate, but it's not a problem!" he added quickly. "I'm Garret, Garret Baker."

"You're my roommate," Wallace said. Unless another fleet of boats had arrived on campus, Garret had to have been with him in the group that Kolton led, but he hadn't noticed him.

"Yeah," Garret said as he pulled a phone from his pocket. "I got an email a couple of months ago about who my roommate was going to be, and we'd been talking about what to bring for a while, but he stopped answering. I guess because they changed our rooms or something."

"Oh," Wallace suddenly felt very bad for only having brought his clothes. "Who were you expecting it to be?"

Garret stared down at his phone, tapping the screen a few times before it came to life, buzzing erratically. "It's doing it again. Mag."

Wallace glanced back to the bed, his phone was still and the screen was black. "Do you want some help finding it?"

"Oh, you don't have to do that," Garret said as he began looking increasingly uncomfortable. "I'm sure you've got unpacking to do."

"Not really." Wallace shrugged and glanced back the only bags he brought. "Let me just grab something first." Wallace grabbed his pack off the floor and brought it to the bed, unzipping it, and grabbed the egg from inside.

As he hoisted the egg out, it seemed to suddenly weigh more than he recalled, taking two hands to scoop it out of the bag. Wallace palmed his face, his forehead was clammy with sweat, but his skin was cold. A dull pain ballooned in his chest as he cradled the egg to him, his lungs felt full of air, but still he couldn't get enough of it.

All of his strength to stand left his body as he turned to Garret, who was reaching out to him. He was falling, his feet tangling. Wallace watched the bland room become a spectrum of colors before his vision slurred to black. He heard Garret's distant voice calling out to him as his head connected with something solid before he hit the floor.

* * *

 **End of Chapter Six**

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Let it be known that I _loathe_ the word Kalosian.

I'd love your feedback about the battle in regards to how it was written. I know that some people don't like for pokémon to be detailed (because we all know what they look like), but for Wallace, who's never seen most of them in his life, I thought it was necessary. But were the move/attack descriptions okay? And in general are there things regarding the battle I could improve on (for future battles)?

This chapter we had a true introduction of **Jason Bahr** by **Killer Memestar** , as well as the debuts of **Neo Spring** by **OPFan37** and **Garret Baker** by **reven228**.

 **Question of the Chapter #5:** Do you think Wallace's escape to the university went as smoothly as he believes, or has he left too many loose ends?


	7. findandrewgates

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Seven – findandrewgates**

 _I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

When he woke, the light was gone, his unlit surroundings held a heavy heat, and his head was throbbing. He was lying flat and through the slits of eyes Wallace could just make out the glow of stars high above him. The folds of his arms and legs were slick with sweat, he tried to move, but his body was torpid. He let out a long, low moan.

"Wallace?"

He lolled his head to the side and his cheek grazed the glossy top of what he realized had to be the mattress in his dorm. His sprawled his fingers out and let them glide across the plastic padding as his eyes blinked opened, leaden with sleep.

A boy, whose name was foreign, but also familiar, sat across the room from him on the other bed, a white glow illuminating his face. "I was worried you weren't going to wake up," he said as he stood and moved to the base of his bed. "I'm going to turn on the light now."

Before Wallace had a chance to prepare for it, the room filled with an artificial yellow light from one of the room's two light sources. The light nudged a spot in the back of his mind that still ached, but blinking helped to adjust his eyes. As he studied the ceiling, Wallace noticed the stars he saw belonged to a collection of glow in the dark stickers on the ceiling. His head rolled back to the side as he watched the boy, Garret, he remembered, fidgeting by the light switches.

"How are you feeling?" Garret asked quietly as he crept across the room, but didn't venture to Wallace's side. "I got the area director when you passed out, he brought the nurse. She said you might have been exhausted or overheated. She asked me a bunch of questions, but I didn't know what to tell her. Wallace?" Garret asked, his voice gentle. "I should get John."

"No," Wallace croaked, his throat dry and his mouth gummy. "I'm fine." He forced himself to sit up, or more accurately, prop up, and brought a hand to the back of his head where his fingers touched a large tender knot.

"You hit your head pretty bad," Garret said, still standing in the center of the room, looking afraid to cross an invisible boundary. "John's the area director by the way, he said you may have a concussion, but we couldn't get you to wake up."

"Okay," Wallace said as he dragged his legs out of bed and hung his head. His eyes fell onto his backpack that laid on its side looking deflated and empty. Wallace lurched forward, a move that instantly made him light headed, and snatched the bag off the floor, the egg was missing. Like someone had flicked him in the back of the head, the memory came back. He had it in his arms when he fell. "My egg?"

Garret stepped back and pointed to the desks against the wall beside them.

Wallace found it sitting on the desk and leaning against the shelf. His worry evaporated at the sight of the egg in one piece.

"You fell on your back and the egg just kind of stayed there, it didn't fall on the floor." Garret retreated fully to his side of the room and sunk down onto his bed, completely made under a light yellow bed set. "Is that your only pokémon?"

Wallace raised his head and dragged his hands down the sides of his face as he looked to Garret who had his eyes fixed on the egg. "Yes."

"That's good." A smile flashed across Garret's face, but fell quickly. "Maybe we can help each other."

"Help each other?"

Garret nodded and dug two miniaturized Poké Balls out from his pocket. "This is all I have. I overheard some people in our hall talking about their teams. I think everyone else has really strong pokémon, but I'm not the only one with a small team anymore." Garret rolled the Poké Balls between his fingers before he reached over and placed them on the desk, but they quickly rolled off and onto the floor. Garret dove for them and scrambled around on his hands and knees while one of the Poké Balls rolled towards Wallace's foot. Again, Garret paused at the imaginary boundary that separated the sides of the room.

Wallace nudged the Poké Ball with his foot and sent it rolling back to Garret. "Only two pokémon. Mag, was it?"

"Really just one, a mareep. Her name is Amber. I just caught Mag on my way here," Garret said as he dusted off the Poké Balls and climbed back onto his bed. "Do you know what's going to hatch?"

"Yes." Wallace looked to the egg and in the bright light he was sure he saw it wiggling. "It was a gift from a friend. He was visiting a gravesite, one of those places trainers go to pay their respects to pokémon that passed away, and this pokémon kept following him around, trying to hug him, doing anything it could to try and cheer him up really." Wallace sat up straight and wiped at his eyes, feeling the onset of tears. The same tears he cried the day he watched the starter pokémon Andrew received die from a severe case of poisoning. "I thought it was sweet, but he didn't want anything to do with it. It kept following him and doing anything it could to make him smile, to take his mind of it. He caught it eventually and bred it to getthe egg for me."

"He sounds like a good friend," Garret said quietly, his eyes still focused on the egg. "Is he the one you were talking about?"

"He was," Wallace said as he ran his hands over the mattress. "Wait, what do you mean talking about?"

"After the nurse finished checking on you, you started talking in your sleep," Garret said as he opened a small silver laptop on his pillow. "You kept saying someone's name, I couldn't really hear, but – it just sounded like you were having a bad dream."

Wallace turned to the window, his cheeks burning. The shades had been pulled over the windows again, but through the gaps he could see the moon. "What time is it?" Wallace asked after he cleared his throat.

"Almost nine. You were asleep for a long time," Garret said. "Are you hungry?"

Wallace's hand went to his stomach at the idea of food. Other than a bowl of cereal that morning he couldn't recall the last time he'd eaten an actual meal. He hadn't eaten any of the food Jason brought while in the Badlands, only choosing to drink water, it was no wonder he passed out. "Starving," he said as he slowly stood.

"The dining room closed an hour ago," Garret said softly. "There's an all night café, but it won't open until tomorrow."

Wallace gaped at his roommate, feeling as if he'd mentioned food and then followed it with bad news for the sole purpose of torturing him.

Garret slipped off his bed and padded over to the door. Between the door and the end of the closet was a small space that seemed just big enough for the miniature fridge that Garret stored there. While Garret rummaged around inside, Wallace scanned the room to see what else had changed. A small black television sat on top of the dresser, blocking the mirror, and the desk on Garret's side held just a few items like an alarm clock and some school supplies.

"I put together a box for you when I got dinner." Garret backed away from the fridge with a styrofoam box in his hands. "You can have it if you want."

Wallace took the box and flipped open the lid that was barely able to close on account of all the food stuffed inside. In the box's small compartments for food there was a small salad, a plastic cup of fruit, breadsticks, some kind of meat, and a sandwich as stuffed as the box itself.

"If you don't like it I can just throw it away, it's fine, I understand," Garret said as he wavered uneasily by the door.

Wallace touched the meat, the bread, and the sandwich, everything was cold, but he devoured it all anyway. Normally a picky eater, he dug into the smorgasbord without thought. After piling the salad into the sandwich and eating it in several bites he made a second sandwich by combining the meat and breadsticks. He shoveled down mouthful after mouthful, chasing the food with gulps of from the fruit cup until the box was empty and Garret was eyeing him like he was afraid he might eat the box as well.

Wallace paused and looked for a napkin, but instead he tentatively wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and let out an unexpected burp. "Excuse me," he said and laughed. It wasn't particularly funny, but from a young age he was drilled about proper table etiquette and wiping his mouth with anything but a napkin was forbidden in his father's presence. Likewise, the idea of burping was never an option unless he wanted to be smacked with a wooden spoon by his governess.

"I-I'm glad you liked it," Garret said as he stepped forward. "I can throw away the box for you."

Wallace smiled, but rather than hand the box over, he dropped it to the floor. "I think I'm going to let that sit there for a while," he said happily. Filth and dirty dishes were another no-no in the Pearce home.

"Are you sure? The bathroom is right across the hall." Garret asked while he eyed the box like it was a bomb. "Maybe we could get a trashcan for the room?"

"Relax. I'll throw it away, eventually. Don't worry about it," Wallace said as he stretched out. The back of his head still pounded, but at least his stomach felt heavy and full.

"If you're feeling up for it there's a hall meeting in a few minutes," Garret said. "They want to go over the rules for the dorms, it's mandatory."

While he felt up to it, attending a meeting seemed like the least fun their options. Perhaps it was being a new person, or just getting away from his father, but Wallace had the urge to do something dangerous. But in lieu of something dangerous, he did something responsible and grabbed his egg, not waiting to leave it alone in case it hatched while he was gone.

He locked their door behind them and followed Garret back through the building the way he'd arrived. Rather than take the first floor hall to the lounge, Garret led him down another flight of stairs and around the corner into an open sitting area in the basement.

The basement lounge was wide and rectangular, filled with rows of black leather furniture, a billiard table, desks of public computers, and lots of open floor space. He and Garret wavered near the opening of the room and opted to stand against the wall, not finding any available seating as all of the couches and armchairs had students occupying them already.

"Feeling better?"

Wallace felt a hand land on his shoulder and looked over, and then up, at a tall thin man standing at his side. His head was buzzed short and he wore a pair of brown glasses and was dressed extremely well compared to the rest of the students in the room. "Uh."

"That's John, our area director," Garret whispered to his shoulder. "He checked on you when you fainted."

Wallace's eyes lit up as he nodded to John. "Much better, thank you."

John smiled and pat his shoulder before he walked off towards the center of the room and eyed a clipboard in his hands.

"After being in the Badlands it's no wonder you lost consciousness."

Wallace scanned the room and found Neo, face practically glued to his tablet screen, walking over. "How did you hear about it?" he asked.

"Your roommate," Neo said as his green eyes flicked to Garret. "He made quite the scene when he came to get John, who I was gathering data on at the time. It seems fated you two would end up together, both of you enjoy disrupting my work."

"H-Hi," Garret said.

Neo smiled and tapped his tablet's screen. "1.06 seconds. Impressive, Garret Baker, from room 313."

"H-How do you know all that?" Garret asked, suddenly looking terrified.

Wallace shook his head and waved his hand at Neo. "That's kind of his thing."

"I've spent my afternoon compiling data about everyone in this room, and by observing conversations, I've gotten a considerable amount of data regarding their pokémon." Neo leaned against the wall with Wallace and Garret as he went back to work typing on his tablet.

"Alright, listen up everyone," John said, his voice booming over the din the common room as he handed a sheet of paper to a student in one of the armchairs. "My name's John. I'm the area director for Civet Complex, and also the resident advisor for Calone Hall. I'm a junior, training and battling major, with a focus on league tactics. I'm sending around a sign in sheet, just sign your name."

John gestured to one of the low tables in the room, to a sloppy stack of papers. "These are handbooks that detail the rules. I'll let you discover all the rules we've enforced here, but I'll go over the most important for you to know right now. Your pokémon are allowed to roam inside your dorms, but if you take them outside of your room you must have control over them. You are responsible for any damages your pokémon cause to your rooms or the property. There is to be no battling inside the ICO, if you are found to have been battling, you will be fined and a consistent failure to abide may result in you being dismissed from the university."

As the sign-in sheet came around, John had the students go around the room and give their name, birthplace, major, and favorite pokémon, all of which Wallace had trouble saying because it was either a lie or he had no clue. "Wallace Peters. I'm from Unova, um, I'm undecided, I guess, and my favorite pokémon is gogoat, maybe," he said as he scrawled his name across the page and John came to retrieve it.

"Cool," John said as he folded the sheet into his back pocket. "The rest of the first year students will be arriving tomorrow and over the weekend you'll be going through a bunch of different orientations and introductions to the university. Second years and up will be arriving on Saturday and classes will begin Monday. If you don't have a class schedule, or have an issue with your schedule, you'll need to head to Lilac Hall, which is our administration building located by the fountains. I'll be posting schedules for the weekend on your doors tonight for you guys to follow so you'll know where you're expected to be and when over the next couple of days. I live on the third floor, room 300, if you have questions come find me."

The meeting was dismissed after everyone grabbed a handbook and they were excused back to their rooms. The rest of the night passed without incident and Wallace unpacked his clothes, finding space for some of them in his dresser, but released he didn't pack any hangers for his closet. Before bed, he started a list of stuff to buy for the room before fell asleep to the sound of Garret's television on a channel about pokémon grooming.

* * *

The following day, Wallace learned much about the university and about his roommate. When he woke the next morning, the empty food box he'd left on the floor was gone and he imagined the scenario of Garret sneaking across the floor to retrieve it. Garret also had a hard time dealing with the public bathroom, something Wallace was amused by as well. Their entire floor, about 15 rooms with two students each, shared one bathroom, nine toilets, and 12 shower stalls. Garret was fully dressed when he left to shower, carrying an armful of toiletries, and returned to the room the same way, fully dressed in a new outfit with his skin and hair still wet with water.

Together they explored campus and ventured to Lilac Hall where Wallace finished the paperwork for his enrollment and was printed out a class schedule. After that, following John's itinerary, they headed to Hawthorn Library and had their pictures taken for their student IDs, and then headed to the Student Union for breakfast.

A wheelchair ramp and a flight of steps led them up to the entrance and to a set of double glass doors on the front of the red brick building. Garret held the door for him, but Wallace stopped in his tracks once he eyes fell on a plague next to the door.

 **Oliver** **Pearce Student Union**

 **In honor of** **Oliver** **Pearce's contribution and donation** **s** **to the university.**

Although he suddenly lost his appetite, Wallace followed Garret up to the second floor dining hall where they swiped their newly printed IDs and were granted access to the buffet style selection for breakfast. There were numerous stations to choose, from all crammed into the open air room that featured an entire wall of windows that opened onto a stone veranda. Voices and music drifted down to them from the third floor that overlooked the cafeteria.

Wallace's stomach did somersaults as he followed Garret around the room to a grill station where he ordered a custom omelette and pancakes, meanwhile Wallace kept his plate empty, unable to stomach the idea of stomaching anything. They found seats on the far left side of the room, near where they entered, in front of a breakfast pastry display and beside more windows.

Once they were settled Garret pulled one of his Poké Balls from his pocket and gently touched the front button. A ray of light fired towards Garret's lap and a blue-bodied quadruped emerged from it. A tuff of curled wool sat in the middle of its head, between two black and yellow striped cones for ears. A tail, with a design to match its ears, flicked up between it and Garret, the end of it, a large dull orange sphere, flailed wildly in the air.

"This is Amber," Garret said as he buried his fingers into the puff of wool on her head and began to scratch.

Wallace narrowed his eyes at the pokémon, her body was blue, but the majority of it looked to be recovering from a buzz cut as small stands of cream wool sprouted from her torso.

"H-Have you ever seen a mareep before?" Garret asked.

"Ree!" Mareep cooed and squeezed her eyes shut as Garret moved onto rubbing her ears. Her tail continued to flick side to side, clearly enjoying herself as she snuggled closer to Garret.

"Never," Wallace said. In the past week he'd seen more pokémon than in his previous eighteen years of life, just how many were there?

"Oh," Garret said, sounding sad. "Usually they're covered in wool, but I sheared Amber before we left home." Garret's eyes fell to the empty plate before Wallace. "You're not eating?" he asked as he looked guiltily at his own plate.

Wallace only shook his head and pushed his empty plate away and cupped his head in his hands. Was it possible for him to find a place in Kalos, the world maybe, that his family's money hadn't touched? Homeschooling came with lessons in table etiquette, business, finance, as well as his family's history.

The man Radix University honored as Oliver Pearce was born into a poor immigrant family and named Oliwier had studied the records of Oliwier's life as he bounced between underdeveloped countries before he found himself a job in the mines of an English countryside. There, Oliwier dug up gems, rocks, and relics that he sold in nearby towns, but his name, full of odd consonants, was disliked by his customers and hard to recall. To blend into the English culture, and make himself memorable, Oliwier Piotr became Oliver Piers.

In the waxing days of pokémon research, the gems Oliver dug up were discovered to have strange effects on pokémon, effects that resulted in evolution. Oliver's gems, and anything else he dug up in the mines, were suddenly worth more than ever. As Oliver Piers climbed the simplistic economic ladder of his day, he set himself apart from the commoners who became fanatics in mining, hoping to follow his success to the top, and Oliver Piers became Oliver Pearce, the progenitor of the Pearce family and its wealth. But one thing the journals passed down through his family about Oliver's life failed to mention were his apparent connections to higher education.

Wallace massaged his temples as he imagined the nearly parallel lines of history crossing at a single point, generations down the line, as the great great great grandson of Oliver Pearce sat in a building Oliver donated money to build.

Wallace snapped back to reality as a plate crashed down the table. His head shot up and he found Neo sitting beside him. "Hi, Neo," he said, observing his friend's clothes. He looked a bit more like the mad scientist Wallace had pegged him for in a checkered shirt with the button done up to his neck and his tablet flashing every couple of seconds.

"The remainder of our class arrived this morning," Neo said, his full attention on his arm tablet. "I've complied all of their data already. It looks promising."

"What's promising?" Wallace asked as he looked over Neo's plate. The entire plate held a layer of scrambled eggs covered with bacon that dripped with jelly, all of which was drowning in what looked like a mixture of oatmeal and gravy. If his stomach hadn't been turning before, it did backflips at the sight of Neo's experiment of a breakfast.

"My chances of finding a compatible mate," Neo said as he powered off his tablet and made soft clicking sound with his mouth.

Wallace cocked up an eyebrow when he saw Garret jerk back and nearly fall from his chair. He was about to say something when he noticed something on the side of Neo's head. At first glance he might have dismissed it as a piece of lint, but it was moving, no _crawling_. Small and practically nothing but tuffs of yellow fur, it paused at the crown of Neo's head and craned its own head around and four blue eyes met Wallace's.

"Hello," he said.

The pokémon squeaked before skittered down Neo's head and buried itself under the collar of his shirt. "What's wrong, don't you like joltik?" Neo asked, his eyes aimed at Garret behind his glasses. "My data indicates you specialize in electric-types," he said, his eyes falling to Amber who had practically buried herself into Garret's jacket.

"I do." Garret had a hand pressed firmly to his chest and seemed to be having trouble breathing. "J-Just not –"

"Insectoids?" Neo asked as he scooped up a spoonful of his breakfast mush. "I have to say, a fear of such pokémon will limit you greatly. But I suppose if you specialize in a single type, you've already limited yourself. Wallace, I see your egg still hasn't hatched."

With one leg folded, and its foot hooked behind the back of his other knee, Wallace created a small gap between his legs where the egg rested. "Do you know how to speed up the hatch time?"

Neo adjusted his glasses, followed by another spoonful. "Of course I know how. But I'd need to observe the egg for a bit to determine just how long its been incubating to accurately determine its remaining time."

"Something tells me if I give you the egg, I'm not getting it back," Wallace said as he rubbed the egg protectively.

"You would, after I finished my research, of course," Neo said with a grin as he shoveled in another spoonful. "Garret, you hatched that mareep from an egg yourself, correct?"

"How did you know that?" Garret asked as he looked nervously between Wallace and Neo. His hands were scratching a pattern into Amber's back while she nibbled at the edge of his jacket.

"Your hometown of Violet City was listed under your name in the class roster. To ensure breeding farms, where trainers abusively breed pokémon, don't rise up, all eggs must be entered in the system at their time of discovery. After that it was a game of connect the dots from an egg you registered to your trainer profile two years ago, to the place the egg was found, and then the possible parent pokémon that were registered at the same location during the time of conception." Neo shrugged as he prepared for another spoonful. "It was simple really. It only took about five minutes this morning while I was getting ready."

"O-okay." Garret pushed his plate away from him, even though he'd barely touched it. He pulled Amber closer to him and her tail swayed around the table, nearly knocking over his plate. "A-Amber, be careful."

"Maree!" Amber cried as she started thumping her tail on the table, apparently enjoying the sound.

"Why are you sitting with us?" Wallace asked.

Neo dunked a small piece of bacon in the mush on his plate before it popped it into his mouth. "Is that a problem?"

"No, just wondering where your roommate is."

"He's got a job on campus that he had to be at this morning," Neo said. "But the better question is why are you two secluding yourselves?"

"Huh?" Garret asked.

Neo aimed his utensil across the dining room. The entire left side was empty aside from the three of them, plus Amber and the hidden joltik, while the rest of the room's tables were filled with chatting students. As Wallace looked over the other students he noticed metal stands with white pieces of paper on the tables.

"Tables were divided up by region to give first years people to talk to from home," Neo said before he turned back to Wallace. "But since you're from Unova too, I guess we are following the rules. But Garret however –"

"I-I followed Wallace," Garret muttered.

"I see." After Neo finished shoveling his breakfast into his mouth he turned his tablet back on just in time for an alarm to go off. "Excellent. Well, I've used up all the time I allotted myself for breakfast. What are your plans for the day, Wallace?" he asked as he pointed his tablet at Amber.

Wallace gave him an exaggerated frown and shrugged. "We got our IDs printed, I got my schedule, so I don't know." Wallace looked over and watched a digital copy of the mareep appear on Neo's tablet, as if he had downloaded data just by focusing mareep in the tablet's camera.

"You have all your textbooks?" Neo asked as he grabbed Garret's plate of food and the empty one Wallace had.

"You don't have much of anything, Wallace, maybe we should go to the bookstore," Garret said. "What do you think, Amber?"

"Mareep!" Amber leapt from Garret's lap and started bouncing around the floor, her tail flicking wildly in excitement.

"That's where I was heading. I need a few things, you're both welcome to join me," Neo said as he headed off to dump their dishes.

Wallace scooped up his egg and stretched out of his seat. "I didn't even think about books." He hadn't thought about school either until just a few days ago. "Do you think they sell bed stuff? And hangers? You're right, I don't have much of anything," he said as it dawned on him just how unprepared he was.

The three boys left the dining hall and relocated to the first floor, near the back of the same building, where the student bookstore was located. Two of its walls were made entirely of glass which gave them a preview of all the merchandise inside before they looped around and found the entrance. The inside was oddly quiet, except for Amber's hooves scratching on the file floor, and filled with shelves and display racks that were overflowing with supplies.

Neo split from them right away and headed to the opposite wall where a selection of electronics sat on the bottom shelf. Garret didn't wander far as he pulled at the sleeves of sweatshirts, all with different versions of the university's name ironed on the front.

An older gentleman stood behind an oval-shaped line of counters that all held displays for keychain trinkets, candy, and travel sized bathroom items. "Let me know if you need anything!" he said.

Wallace fished his schedule and the list he made last night from his back pocket as he moseyed to the left side of the store. There he found rows of shelves all stacked high with textbooks, above the books were purple signs with class codes printed on them in white. He wandered down various aisles, matching the codes on his schedule with the ones on the racks, when he heard the shuffle of feet behind him. Wallace turned, but the aisle was empty.

He shook off the feeling and went back to eyeing his schedule. Although technically given classes with open spots, his schedule seemed to lean more towards training than anything else. As he scanned the shelves for books for UC 210: Statistics, he felt a spider of unnerving fear dance up his spine. For a second he thought Neo's joltik might have latched onto him, but he glanced over his shoulder again, but still the store appeared to be mostly empty. The cashier was leaning against the counter, he could see Garret's head bobbing around a rack of hats and Neo was testing a pair of headphones.

Unable to focus on matching numbers, he left the textbook section and wandered to the end of the aisle to a rack of keychains. He ran his fingers along the dangling baubles, reminded of the set of charms he found in Andrew's room, when he heard the sound of breathing behind him. Pursing his lips, Wallace turned to leave, but slammed into someone directly behind him. Textbooks, notebooks, papers, and a load of plastic packages burst into the air before they clattered to the floor.

"I'm so sorry!" Wallace said, rather than pick up the fallen items his eyes flew to his egg, nestled in his arms, that looked unaffected by the collision. He watched the stranger dip down into a squat and in a matter of seconds gather up the fallen supplies into the folds of long arms.

"Wallace, are you okay?"

Wallace threw a look over his shoulder, Garret was peeking around the end of the aisle. He glanced down and saw Amber dart out between Garret's legs. She looked ready to attack, but instead her feet slipped on the floor near a wet floor sign and her body flipped sideways. "Ree!" she cried as she landed on the floor with a splash.

"Amber, are you okay?" Garret asked as he crouched to help Amber stand.

Amber bleated back at him defiantly, as she stood on her own, and stared down the aisle.

"Everything is fine." A boy close to Wallace's age stood back up and smiled, looking a little flushed, that turned his already tanned face a golden hue. "Probably should have been watching where I was going."

"No, that was my fault." Wallace could see a crook in his nose, evidence of it having been broken before, and a mole under his left eye. A large deep red hat rested on his head, casting a shadow over his face, and wheat blond hair stuck out of the back, laying flat against the back of his head. His eyes trailed down to his chest, to a name tag. "Ignatius," Wallace read.

Ignatius slapped a hand to his chest to cover the name tag and smirked as he cast his eyes somewhere else. "Don't say anything."

Wallace shook his head and laughed. "I wasn't going to say anything. It's a nice name."

"Call me Ignis, my friends call me Ignis," Ignatius said as he removed his hand and held it out to Wallace.

"Oh, we're friends now?" Wallace asked, pointing to his outstretched hand.

"Only if you want to be." Ignatius grinned and tilted his hand so his palm was to the ceiling. "I won't force it." He moved past Wallace and started to stack the items in his arms onto the shelves.

"Well considering I'm the new kid and I have to buy all of this today," Wallace said as waved his list of dorm essentials around in the air. "I don't think a bookstore worker would be the worst friend to make right now."

"Join the club. I'm 'the new kid' too," Ignatius said.

Wallace watched as Ignatius expertly emptied his arms on the shelves and managed to adjust the displays at the same time. "So first years really do have jobs?" Wallace asked, remembering that Neo's roommate worked somewhere on campus.

"Yeah. Depending on when you were accepted you got the chance to attend a work-study seminar and get an early job placement. It helps with tuition," Ignatius said. "I've actually been here for most of the summer working. So, friend, what are you in need of?"

Before Wallace could answer, Ignatius snatched the paper out of his hand and skimmed it. "Apparently our entire stock," he said followed by a hearty laugh. "Nine textbooks, just about every school supply known to man. Poké Balls, potions, antidotes, hangers, bedding, and the list goes on. Did you pack anything?"

Wallace regarded him with a short smile, feeling a little embarrassed, and reached to take the list back. "I'll just find it on my own, never mind."

Ignatius raised his arm and kept the list just out of Wallace's reach.

"Can I just have it back?" Wallace asked.

"Relax. I'm kidding, I'm kidding." Ignatius smiled and lowered the list, but kept Wallace from grabbing it. "How about we trade? I'll put together an order for you and have it delivered to your room, free of charge. I mean, you have to pay for it, but my generosity is free of charge," Ignatius said with another wide, grand, smile.

"Not totally free, you said trade. So what you want in return?" Wallace asked.

"Your name and room number." Ignatius pulled a pen and a slip of paper from the pockets of his tattered jean shorts and held them out to Wallace. "For timely delivery purposes, of course."

"Of course." Wallace couldn't help but laugh as he scrawled his information on the paper and handed it back.

"Are you going to the bonfire tonight?" Ignatius asked.

"Bonfire?"

"It's some kind of little tradition for the first years. There are a few upperclassmen on campus and they've been working to get it ready. They light a fire in field between here and Vetiver Hall. A few students are picked to put on a show," Ignatius said. "Starts at nine, you should come, I'll be there. Bring your friends," Ignatius said as he tipped his head back.

Wallace looked over his shoulder, Neo and Garret were standing there at the end of the aisle, the former with numerous plastic bags hanging off his arms. When he turned back, Ignatius was heading off down the aisle, waving the slip of paper in the air.

"See ya later, Wallace Peters."

* * *

Hours later Wallace and Neo stepped out of the ICO and into a cloudless chilly summer night. Wallace had barely spent a day on the campus, but he was already too familiar with its wind tunnel-like formation. Despite the campus being yards away from the actual waters of Azure Bay, the wind still rolled off the water and rushed through the school's grounds while being trapped between the buildings with little space between them.

Ignatius offered to walk them to the bonfire, but Neo didn't plan on getting there right when it started, and after Garret declined to the invite Wallace opted to stay behind and wait for Neo, not wanting to be alone at the bonfire.

Although Wallace had only a faint idea of the campus's layout, and a vague description of where the bonfire was being held, once outside all he had to do was follow his senses. The scent of burning wood was heavy in the air and Wallace heard the roar of a crowd in the distance. With Neo trailing absently behind him, face glued to his tablet, Wallace led them on a path that turned from brown stone in the ICO courtyard, to concrete, to blacktop, and back to stone before they stepped onto the grass field between the side of the Student Union, the front of Vetiver Hall, and the back of Lilac Hall.

The 'small tradition', as Ignatius had put it, stretched about half the length of a football field that was sectioned off by rows of trees on two sides and stone pathways on the others. From a paved lot behind Lilac Hall to another lot beside Vetiver Hall, students and parents were lounging on blankets and towels on the grass. In the center, a fire, several times taller than Wallace, raged in full force and illuminated the entire field.

As they made their way through throngs of people on the ground, Wallace noticed large black boxes stationed around the field, speakers he guessed, by the sound of electronic music pumping from them. Although it was impressive, no one's attention was on the fire. Instead everyone was facing south to a large sand arena that a makeshift stage had been built over.

In time with the music, a girl stepped onto the stage in a blue dress that was sectioned off in the middle by black lace and beaded at the top. Her hair, ashen from the fire's distant glow, was held up in a high ponytail that did nothing to help its length as it reached down to her knees. She flashed her audience a brilliant smile and swayed her hips to the music, inching closer to the edge of the stage with each step, before she threw her arms into the air. "Let me introduce you to my team. Choco, Vanilla, and Cream!"

"We're in for a show," Neo said as he glanced back and forth from the stage to his tablet as three pokémon took the stage around the girl. "A pancham, a gloom, and a buneary, typical."

The crowd roared as the girl stepped to the edge of the stage, cocked her leg up, and started to swing her arm in a circle, ruffling up the different layers of her skirt in the process. After a beat in the music her pokémon joined in and mimicked her movements. "Vanilla, petal blizzard, please!"

The somewhat dopey looking gloom, Vanilla, twirled around ahead of its owner and from the bud on its head released a collection of multi-colored petals.

The girl was dancing again, matching her steps with the time signature of the music and making dramatic and grand movements that her pokémon followed effortlessly. "Cream, ice beam," she sang out, to the crowd's delight.

Cream, the buneary, hopped beside Vanilla and fired a crystal blue ray of light that passed over the flittering flower petals, hardening them under a layer of thin ice.

"Dark pulse, Choco, you know!"

Her final pokémon, Choco the pancham, darted out and jumped at Vanilla and Cream, who hoisted it into the air amongst the flurry of petals. With a triumphant cry, Choco brought its hands together and the space over the stage filled with black rings and purple lights. Choco's attack struck the frozen petals and propelled them out over the field. The crowd gasped as the petals passed over head, all heading for the fire that cast brilliant glints of light off them as they neared it. The closer the petals came the more intense the glints of light became until each of the frozen petals released a shimmer in the fire's heat that not even the dark energy around them could dim.

As the frozen petals drifted down to the audience, some of them thawing near the fire, the crowd erupted in applause and cheers. Wallace looked back to the stage and saw the girl and her pokémon bowing. "What was that?" he asked.

"Rather than battle as a career, some trainers focus on using their pokémon's moves as a form of art," Neo said as he glanced from the trio of pokémon to his tablet. "They display their talents and moves in showcases or performances for prizes and recognition. It's not as easy as it looks."

"It didn't look easy at all," Wallace said as he watched the girl embrace her buneary in a hug.

"It takes an incredible amount of work and coordination for trainer and pokémon to utilize their moves in new and brilliant ways."

Wallace glanced over his shoulder to find the person who just spoke. Neo did the same, and they found a woman with dark blue hair falling past her shoulders towering over them. She was dressed in a loose fitting blouse and slacks and had her arms crossed over her chest, her dark eyes on the stage.

"Who are you?" Neo asked as he hovered a finger over his tablet screen.

"Dr. Audrey Stratton," she replied calmly, her eyes falling to meet Neo's. "Professor of Coordination and Appeal, who might you be?" she asked and extended her hand to him.

"0.17 seconds. Impressive." Neo eyed her carefully as he tapped his tablet screen. "I'm Neo Spring, training major and future frontier brain," Neo said as he shook her hand.

Dr. Stratton turned her hard eyes on Wallace who held out his free hand. "Wallace Peters. Undecided about – well everything."

Dr. Stratton didn't seem amused by his answer, but didn't comment on it as she raised her gaze above their heads and smiled. "I'd like you to meet my best and brightest."

They turned and saw the girl being helped down from the stage by a boy in an orange and black outfit. Wallace immediately recognized the boy's beet red hair, it was Kolton, their guide from yesterday. The two of them walked towards them, the girl's black heels sinking into the ground with each step didn't seem to phase her. As they came closer Wallace got a good look at the girl. Perhaps it was her white-blonde hair with blue streaks or her pale skin, but when Dr. Stratton said her name, it didn't surprise him.

"This is Azalea Foxe, one of Radix's most promising performance majors and Kolton Fafnir, one of my best coordination students," Dr. Stratton said. "Wonderful performance tonight, both of you."

"Thank you!" Azelea said as she practically jumped in the air.

"I guess we missed your performance," Neo said, his eyes darting to Kolton.

Wallace could hear his heart beating. The girl standing no more than a few feet in front of him attended Andrew's birthday party at Parfum Palace. Despite his newly brown-black hair color, his cut, and his glasses, Wallace suddenly felt very vulnerable, like an exposed nerve. To his knowledge he'd never seen her before that moment at the party when he caught her dancing with Andrew, but he had been on the balcony when his father introduced him. What were the odds she might remember him? Or the odds she was one of Andrew's friends and he told her something about him, or shown her a picture?

The conversation continued on around Wallace as Dr. Stratton introduced everyone. Wallace occasionally saw Azalea glance in his direction, possibly to ask him something, but his throat was a knot.

By the time the thump of his heart beat died away in his ears, Dr. Stratton, Azalea, and Kolton were gone. Neo was still at his side, typing on his tablet when Dr. Stratton's voice boomed out over the field. Wallace looked up and found her on stage in front of a microphone. The chatter and activity of the bonfire died away and was replaced by a low hum from the speakers.

"Thank you students and parents for joining us here tonight on our annual end of summer bonfire," Dr. Stratton said through the mic. "Every year we do something a little different and I was fortunate this year for the theme to land on Beauty Not Battle."

Wallace watched Dr. Stratton gesture to the stage and his eyes found a banner that stretched the entire length of the stage. Beauty Not Battle was spelled out in grand and curvy letters and the banner was decorated with glitter and ribbons.

"This tradition not only celebrates the accomplishments of our students while they were away from the university for the summer, but welcomes new students into the Radix University family. The university takes in roughly four hundred students every year, that includes first years as well as transfers. And while we are so happy to have everyone here, the university is greatly saddened by the recent news that one of our incoming students is not able to attend."

Wallace watched as Dr. Stratton's mood changed into something with more of an edge. There were whispers and mutterings around the field before she continued.

"We checked in the remainder of our first year class this morning and found that only one student was missing from it, a young man by the name of Andrew Gates," Dr. Stratton said.

Amplified by the speakers, Dr. Stratton's words hit Wallace like a sledgehammer from all sides. His knees went slack and he staggered away from Neo, suddenly unable to get in a good breath. A starburst of pain bloomed in his forehead, and his mind felt like someone had opened his skull, poured in water, and mixed well with a metal spoon. The pounding in his ears returned, but over it he could hear the crowd responding to Dr. Stratton, they were awing and gasping.

"I know many of you, like myself, tuned in to watch Andrew's journey via PokéView and the staff and faculty of the university were so excited when he came to campus last year, on several occasions, to visit before finally applying," Dr. Stratton said. "I had the opportunity to talk with Andrew and oversaw one of his tours of the campus. Many of our current students were fans of Andrew's PokéView streams and were excited about the idea of sharing classes with him. Never before had a potential student held such weight with the university. Which is why the news that Andrew has been missing for six days is so hard to hear."

Wallace managed to keep his footing as the crowd erupted in another wave of gasps and this time the chatter picked up.

"As word spread around campus, some of our students set up a website, ," Dr. Stratton said. "There you can give your support for the ongoing search for Andrew and share any memories you may have of him."

Dr. Stratton kept talking, but Wallace darted away from the bonfire at a breakneck pace. He crossed over a winding stone path that led him onto another field that sat between the Student Union, the ICO, and an empty lot. As he got his breathing under control he gripped his egg so tightly to his chest he thought he heard his ribs crack, but he knew it was something else. His breath hitched in his throat as he pulled the egg back and observed the side of it, marred with minute cracks that focused in the dented center.

"No, no, no, no!" Wallace cried. As he ran his fingers over the broken side of the egg blue-green chips fell away, revealing a milky white substance beneath it. Wallace fell to the ground and held the egg carefully in his hands as the small cracks he created began to spread. His wide and panicking eyes traced the largest of the fractures as it reached the crown of the egg and then split into several smaller breaks that ran down the sides.

Wallace sat back, his hands barely touching the egg, as it crumbled in his hands. Fragments of the egg, an alien grey under the moonlight, coated his hands and arms as the outer shell fell away entirely, leaving behind only the milky interior. His mouth hung open as a green light blinked to life inside the viscous white interior. His eyes followed the blinking lights as a red followed green and yellow followed red before all three lights blinked together.

Something prodded the top of the mass and Wallace removed his hands and watched as the egg's remainder bulged and poked out at certain points. The blinking came more rapidly before what looked like a small curved tail poked a hole through the sack. The body inside wiggled and tore the hole wider before light blue arms emerged from it.

Speechless, Wallace watched as the rest of the body emerged from the sack that now lie deflated in his lap. The pokémon floated just a few inches above the ground and hovered side to side, its body moving in a horizontal figure eight. Its rounded arms lifted, revealing small digits at the end, that blinked red, green, and yellow in Wallace's face. Its oval shaped head, with large indentations on the sides, tipped sideways as its large green eyes blinked with curiosity at Wallace.

* * *

End of Chapter Seven

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ I didn't want to come right out and say what Wallace's egg hatched into, but I hope you got it. In other news, I completed the national dex on Pokémon X this week.

This time around we have character debuts of **Ignatius Mercer** by **The Pocketwatch Ripper** , **Professor Audrey Stratton** , and a true introduction of **Azalea Foxe,** both by **ChibiMuffehnz27**

 **Question of the Chapter #6:** Do you think Andrew's missing presence at the university will mean trouble for Wallace?


	8. What Waits Inside

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Eight – What Waits Inside**

 _I will show you fear in a handful of dust. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

The following day, Wallace perched on a knuckle of searing-hot rock while Garret and Neo walked down a lopsided ridge that laid before him. Between the boys, Wallace's elgyem teetered from side to side, its stubbed legs hovering just inches above the rock as it struggled to remain aloft. Below him, a river reflected the sun's radiant light, creating a glimmering ribbon that twirled through an island full of leafy palms, ferns, and foliage of trees that had already begun the chromatic change into autumn.

A stiff wind gusted in from the north, arid and full of heat. Despite it being within August's fever pitch, the island's heat was still a surprise. Wallace had never gone on summer vacations with his father, instead he watched Andrew trek through forests in the summer heat and saw just how miserable his friend looked. But now he had an experience of his own to account for how awful the summer was. Wallace rubbed sweat from the nape of his neck as he pulled apart a rolled up plastic bag and fished through a collection of empty repel cans to find one half-empty.

He made a quick and sporadic spraying motion around himself and around elgyem as well, to give them momentary relief from the endless bug-types that swarmed them. Their buzzing became unbearable as they hovered closer, as if they sensed when the repel's effect would wear off.

Wallace pulled at his shirt in an attempt to cool himself off from the melt-you-to-a-puddle heat before he slowly stood up on the slate grey rock ridge. Elgyem glanced back at him, wide green saucer eyes searching his face for directions, Wallace nodded forward. The going was slow as the ridge was composed of large round boulders that looked to have been cleaved off, creating flat and smooth sides with sharp edges, all lined neatly in a row as far as his eyes could see. Wallace palmed sweat from his forehead as he wondered why he'd agreed to come at all.

" _Garret!" Wallace yelled as soon as he entered his dorm room. Wallace flinched at the sound of the wooden door smacking against the stone wall as he glanced to the squirming blue pokémon cradled in his arms. "I need your help."_

 _Garret sat crossed legged on his bed and slowly closed down his laptop, his eyes falling from Wallace's panicked face to the pokémon in his arms. "What's wrong?"_

" _I see your egg finally hatched. Elgyem, how uninteresting."_

 _Wallace found Neo sitting backwards in the chair at Garret's desk, face lit up from underneath by his tablet. "Oh, you're not interested in studying it?" Wallace asked, out of breath._

 _Neo nudged his glasses back up his nose as he cast Wallace a fleeting glance. "I mentioned it already, but I'm from Unova. There's not a pokémon in the region I don't have data on. Is that why you left the bonfire?"_

" _I um, heard it cracking and just wanted to get someplace quiet to focus," Wallace said as he looked to Garret who was focused on studying the tiles in the floor. "I've never hatched an egg before."_

" _Clearly," Neo said._

" _Neo came looking for you, said he lost you at the bonfire," Garret said, his eyes slowly trailing back up to Wallace._

" _I just wanted to remind the two of you of tomorrow's opportunity," Neo said as he stood._

" _Opportunity?" Wallace asked._

" _Don't you check your student email?"_

" _I have a student email?" Wallace asked, growing more confused every time Neo opened his mouth._

 _Neo's eyes flicked up to Wallace as he powered down his tablet. "Yes, and in it you have an email inviting you, and all other first year students, to the safari trip tomorrow afternoon," Neo said as he smoothed down a strand of his hair that stuck out from the side of his head._

" _Safari?" Wallace asked._

" _Every year, before classes begin, the university allows first year students to explore the islands that surround campus," Neo said. "Since the university's founding, the area surrounding it has been transformed and modified to hold a variety of wildlife from different regions. Essentially, Radix has built mini safari zones for its students to use, as the Kalos region is somewhat limited in its selection." Neo walked towards the door and glanced to his tablet. The boats leave at four tomorrow," he said over his shoulder to Wallace._

" _Since you only have elgyem and I only have Amber and Mag, I thought we could go together," Garret said, a rare glint of happiness flashing across his face. "If you want to, I'd understand if you didn't."_

" _Sounds like fun," Wallace said bleakly as he remembered his trek through the Badlands and all the Poké Balls he wasted trying to catch anything._

" _Then it's decided, we'll take a safari trip tomorrow. Please be ready to leave before the boats are scheduled to depart," Neo said as he finger combed the sides of his hair back into wing-like patterns. "I won't miss the opportunity to gather new data and watch the capture styles of our classmates because you enjoy taking long showers," he said before he vanished out of the room._

As Wallace watched Garret wobble from side to side on the ridge, he thought back to staying up most of the night playing with him, elgyem, and Garret's mareep, Amber. The four of them chased each other around the room and blew through most of Garret's food supply feeding elgyem until the baby pokémon passed out from exhaustion. Wallace followed soon after and was awoken that afternoon to Garret's gentle, but persistent nudging of his shoulder.

Wallace tipped his head down in an effort to keep the sun out of his eyes and watched the placement of his feet on the ridge line. While elgyem hovered down the boulder line without regard, Wallace was careful not to get his shoes stuck in the deep crevices between each boulder when a low rumbling seemed to shake the land. "Was that an earthquake?" he asked, frozen to his spot, up ahead Garret and Neo stopped as well.

"Probably, but nothing to worry about!" Neo called out and waved them forward.

"Elgyem," Wallace said as he crouched down and formed a cradle with his arms.

The green lights on elgyem's hands lit up as what Wallace had to guess was a smile formed on its face. "Elgy!" Elgyem cried out as he wavered in the air towards Wallace and snuggled into his arms.

Wallace secured elgyem before he started walking again, his eyes scanning the trees and brush around him when the ground began to shake again. He tried to lower himself, to lower his center of gravity, but it did nothing to prevent his feet from slipping against the smooth stone. Wallace scrambled to stay upright as his shoes scraped against the ridge before he lost his balance and was tumbling away from the rock line. His arms flew open and elgyem floated away as he was hurled away from the rock with nothing under his hands but air.

Wallace watched the ground come closer as he flipped mid-air and landed roughly on his back and went tumbling into a bush. He quickly rolled to his stomach in time to see the ridge line heave, swell, and then come back down with a slam so forceful a gust of wind smacked him in the face. Wallace's eyes darted around the line for his friends and found Neo staggering backwards, his arms pinwheeling as the ridge shook violently, but more than shaking, it was moving and rising. He followed the line of boulders as they rose in a motion like a wave or a serpent posed to strike.

A low rumble, like thunder, but right in front of him, caused Wallace to clamp his hands over his ears. Through squinted eyes he saw Garret on his stomach, clutching at the stone for dear life as it continued to lift off the ground. As the rolling rumble of thunder died away Wallace listened to trees snapping as something large moved through the island's forest around him.

"This is perfect!" Neo said from somewhere beyond the rock line.

Wallace's eyes opened wide to take in the sight of something massive and grey emerging over the treetops. His eyes took in the sight of huge boulders, all connected and moving in order, that led to the largest of the stones with a shard of rock jutting out of it. Wallace scanned the boulder in an attempt to make sense of it: a large pair of eyes stared down at him and a jagged mouth was grooved into the boulder like the opening of a tunnel.

"What the –"

Wallace's voice became lost under what sounded like an instantaneous boom of thunder as the creature's mouth opened and it roared. The pure force that came from the beast caused the trees to bend and sway. Wallace shielded his eyes as dirt and debris blew up into his face before he felt a pair of hands on him. He squinted up to see Neo and Garret behind him.

"It's an onix, don't be scared," Neo said as he held his tablet up and took a picture of the stone giant. "I've never seen one this close before." Neo turned his attention to the tablet as he digested onix's data. "I have to capture it. Pay attention, Wallace, I'll show you my technique for a sure fire capture!"

"Joltik won't be able to hurt it," Garret said as he helped Wallace off the ground.

"You're not actually going to fight that thing!" Wallace gasped. The ground was rumbling again as onix shifted its gigantic body around the island.

"You two are really green," Neo said. "Everyone knows you don't battle in a safari. You have to lure and capture."

Garret moved to Wallace's side as Neo scooped up a handful of small stones from the ground. He kept his eyes focused on onix as he opened his own plastic bag and withdrew the bag of food their guide provided. "Watch and learn," Neo said as he chucked a handful of food into the air at onix.

The rock-type, Wallace judged from its appearance, followed the small pellets as they fell to the ground and then rocked its huge body to nuzzle its head into the earth in search of the food. Wallace tensed at the ground as every movement onix made felt like an earthquake with no warning.

Neo took the opportunity to get several Poké Balls ready before he began hurling the rocks out into the surrounding foliage.

As the rocks soared away, they whizzed through leaves and branches, making distant rustling sounds that alerted onix, causing it to whip its body in different directions trying to follow the sounds. Neo continued tossing out rocks after waiting for onix to resume eating, and after all the rocks were gone he hurled one of the Poké Balls at onix's head.

Wallace watched in awe as the Poké Ball struck its target between the eyes and in a matter of seconds the gigantic pokémon was gone, vanished with a flash of light, into a Poké Ball that landed with a soft thud on the ground. Neo approached it carefully as the Poké Ball rocked from side to side. After three shakes the Poké Ball emitted a light clicking sound and Neo snapped his fingers.

As Neo rushed to collect the Poké Ball, Wallace felt himself relaxing in the silence and calm that followed onix. He stuck his fingers into his ears and rubbed into them to ease the ringing left by onix's bellowing roar. "What the hell is an onix? Why was it so big?" Wallace asked as he felt a weight land on his shoulder. He looked over to find elgyem standing on his shoulder, one hand pressed to its mouth and its wide eyes blinking rapidly. "I'm glad you're okay," Wallace said.

Elgyem responded by prodding Wallace's cheek with its free hand and blinking its green digit. "Elgy."

"There are pokémon out there a lot scarier than onix," Neo said as he walked back over. "You'd better be prepared."

Wallace sighed and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. For the briefest of seconds, Wallace found himself imagining something bigger and more grotesque than onix, before Neo's voice brought him back.

"Our time is almost up, let's keep moving," Neo said.

Wallace turned and watched Garret follow along behind Neo who was stomping off into the thicker part of the forest. When they first landed, their guide allotted them five hours to spend exploring the chain of islands established in Azure Bay. Neo decided twenty minutes was all they were allowed to spend on each if they were going to see all the islands in one trip.

"Coming," Wallace said as he scanned the surrounding brush and trees before he jogged forward to catch up.

"Wallace, have you decided on elgyem's nickname yet?" Garret asked over his shoulder as Neo led them down a narrow desire path.

"I was thinking about -"

"Forget the nickname, how about putting it inside a Poké Ball before it abandons you," Neo cut in.

Wallace cocked a brow up and glanced to elgyem who sat placidly on his shoulder, showing no signs of wanting to leave. "Is that necessary?"

"It's common sense," Neo said as he turned and walked backwards, taking over-exaggerated large steps to avoid tripping. "Even though you hatched it, it's not technically yours until you capture it. It might seem very affectionate and close to you, but if it finds a reason to leave there's nothing stopping it. It's bad enough it just hatched and is more than likely the weakest pokémon in our school, but if it won't listen to your commands you'll fall to the bottom of the class, without a doubt."

Wallace bit the inside of his cheek as he looked to elgyem again, who had taken to watching the passing scenery. Catching elgyem hadn't been an option yesterday without any equipment, but their guide had given each student a bag full of luxury edition Poké Balls before they set off. "What is it like inside a Poké Ball? What if I catch it and elgyem doesn't like it inside?" Wallace asked as he dug around in the plastic bag and pulled forth one of the provided Poké Balls. Unlike the one that Andrew's gogoat had been in, the ones provided were a glossy black color with red and yellow rings.

"Oh, so you're going to be one of those kinds of trainers, huh?" Neo asked with an eye roll that Wallace saw, despite the distance.

"What?"

"The kind that's going to keep their pokémon out of their ball the entire time," Neo said. "There are plenty of trainers who think like that, who think it makes them original, but it doesn't. Poké Balls are designed to make the pokémon inside comfortable and keep them from escaping. Elgyem will be fine." Neo said as he turned back around and picked up his pace.

"I-I wouldn't do it if you're not comfortable with it," Garret said. "After I hatched Amber I spent a week or so playing with her before I caught her."

Wallace smiled as he dropped the Poké Ball back into the bag. "Thanks, Garret."

"Oh, this wasn't in the guide book," Neo said, paused beside a tall tree, with its branches clamped under his arm as he peered through an opening. "Come look."

Garret pounced along the uneven ground while Wallace took a slower pace to keep elgyem still, and when he reached Neo's side he saw what had caused the boy to stop in his tracks. Nestled among the lush and ripe greenery was a home, a mansion, that appeared long abandoned by both time and civilization.

The boys ducked under the branch that Neo held back and stepped into a clearing of overgrown grass. The house, practically one with nature, judging by branches that scraped across the sides of its slate black roof and the ivy that scaled its dark brick exterior. High above the house, where the limbs of the island's tallest trees stretched, was clear. None of the branches seemed to reach far enough from the sides to cover the clearing, allowing the house to sit in a patch of rare yellow sunlight that broke through the green canopy.

Neo wasted no time in darting through the thigh-high grass towards the mansion. He stopped at the giant front doors that had a thick and rusted chain looped through their handles, and was secured by a not-so-secure broken padlock.

"W-What are you doing?" Garret asked as he and Wallace joined Neo at the door.

"Going inside," Neo said dryly as he stepped back and began threading the chain out through the handles.

"This looks like private property," Garret said. "L-Like someone's home for the summer."

Wallace resisted the urge to snort. "No one who summers in Kalos would let their place turn into this. They'd have workers to maintain it during the off-season and maybe even have relatives stay to keep the utilities on. Maybe it belongs to the university?"

"Then we shouldn't go in without permission," Garret said quickly.

"Unclench, Garret. It's fine." Neo dropped the length of chain on the stone steps and tried the handle, which didn't move. "Give me a hand."

Wallace nodded before he turned and leaned into the door with his free shoulder. Moving in concert with Neo, Wallace shoved his weight onto the door before it busted open in a flurry of dust and stale air.

Neo's mouth fell open in awe as they stepped through the doorway, but Wallace frowned seeing the state of decay and abandonment of the house. Everything was covered in a layer of caked dust or tarnished with rust. Something with wings fluttered above and Wallace considered the fact they might have been the first humans to step foot inside in years.

But despite the house's current state, Wallace could see beyond what years of neglect had done. As guessed from its exterior, the inside was enormous. The boys, with Garret following meekly behind, stood at the bottom of the biggest staircase Wallace had ever seen. Stone newel posts connected white marble steps to a winding ebony banister. A chandelier, draped in thick grey webs, hung above them, rattling in the fresh wind that seemed to be the first breath of fresh air the house had had in a long time.

Neo kept gasping as he wandered off around the entry, Garret stayed near the door, shifting nervously from foot to foot, and Wallace moseyed off to the right wall. There he found an old mirror, its glass spared from the collection of dust, but still discolored and dark, sitting above a small warped table. Wallace stared at his reflection. With his hair dyed brown and his black rimmed glasses, he seemed like a darker person than the last time he saw himself. Behind him he watched Garret inching further into the house that also seemed to be a darker version of its former self.

When Wallace pulled away from the mirror Neo and Garret were both gone, but he followed the sound of Neo's gasps to a room to the side of the entryway. Unlike the entry, it was filled with light from a giant window that looked over a patio that was hidden from view outside. Weeds and grass grew between cracks in dark stones and vines climbed the remains of crumbling pillars.

The room itself seemed like a parlor, with two rotted couches, a fireplace that was several times taller than Wallace, and a black grand piano. Wallace ran a finger over the piano's cover, surprised by the lack of dust on top. As he walked around the large and forgotten instrument he pressed down on keys that struck a random loud chord through the room.

Garret jolted from his spot near the entry door and narrowed his eyes at Wallace. "C-Can we please go?"

"What, are you scared of pianos?" Neo asked as he left the parlor through another side door on the wall adjacent to the entry.

"Relax Garret, there's no one here but us," Wallace said as he gestured for him to follow.

Neo led them down a narrow hallway with bare walls and empty gas lights into a kitchen. The boys scattered around a wide white marble island topped with cracked pages that had turned brown with age. The kitchen held three deep farm sinks, deep enough for each of the boys to crawl into, a furnace oven, and a reddish tile floor, cellular and stained.

"I want to leave!" Garret gasped as he peered over into one of the sinks.

Wallace came to his side and glanced inside. Two small pokémon, with dingy purple fur, were dead near the drain with clumps of what looked like desiccated food between them.

Neo brushed off Garret's reluctance to explore any longer and led them through a laundry room, pantry, guest room, and a smaller kitchen attached to the back of the house before they looped around to the entryway again. "Let's check out the upstairs," Neo said.

"I'll pass," Garret said firmly, his arms folded as he refused to step back inside the house.

"Go ahead, we'll wait outside," Wallace said for Garret's benefit.

Neo shook his head at the two of them before he gingerly climbed the steps and vanished out of sight. Wallace pulled elgyem from his shoulder and let it float and explore ahead of them as he and Garret walked the perimeter of the house.

The intense sunlight from their arrival had died down under the cover of heavy looking clouds that moved slowly in from the north. Pokémon chirped and hummed around them in the trees as Wallace and Garret followed elgyem to a large oak surrounded by plumes of moss.

Elgyem floated in orbit around the tree, blinking the green digit of its hand at it. Garret reached the tree first and ran his hands over its trunk. "There are names carved into the wood," he said.

"Anyone we know?" Wallace joked, but the reality of his remark hit him. As Wallace Pearce he'd met too many people to remember, but actually knew very few of them and in his knew life he probably knew even less. So when he approached the tree he didn't expect to recognize one of the names: _Oliver_ _P._ _& Regin_ _a_ _D._

A house older than anyone could recall and the name Oliver etched into a tree onto its property made Wallace's stomach drop. The chest hollowing feeling that followed must have registered on his face because when Garret turned to him, he too looked upset.

"What's wrong, Wallace?"

Wallace opened his mouth to speak, but felt like vomit might come up instead, when there was a loud _**BANG**_ and something flashed in Wallace's periphery. The boys turned back to the house, their eyes scanning the windows before a cyclone of debris and superheated air blasted out from inside, shattering three windows and spraying the yard with glass.

The shock of the blast knocked elgyem out of the air and Garret off his feet. The island suddenly felt scorching hot and Wallace felt the heat drying his eyes. The room with the broken windows dripped with sounds and smells: the pungent sting of fresh-cut grass, the smell of smoke, and an isolated cry that didn't sound human.

Heart thumping, Wallace pulled Garret to his feet and then scooped elgyem, who wriggled awkwardly in the high grass, to his chest, before they sprinted back to the front of the building. The boys rushed into smoke that drifted over the high railings from the second floor as they climbed the staircase, with no concern for it to hold their weight.

They followed the smells that stood out from the ones they had come to expect with the house, to an open doorway and inside found Neo crouched over Lampent, who laid twitching in a spreading haze of black-blue gloom. Wallace rushed to his side, but froze seeing the injury Lampent had sustained. Its entire right arm, once black, was a faded grey. The epicenter of the injury completely shattered Lampent's arm and the black-blue haze was rapidly leaking out. Lampent's yellow eyes were vacant and hazy while the blue flame at its core flickered on the verge of dying.

"Over there, Wallace, look," Garret said.

Wallace whipped his head in Garret's direction to find him pointing with a shaky hand across the room. Wallace followed his gesture to the far side of what appeared to be a library, and found a small boy standing flush against the opposite wall. Before him, a green flower-like pokémon stood posed, ready to fight.

"It was an accident, he tried to take Atropa from me!"

From his spot on the floor, Wallace figured the boy couldn't be much taller than him, and looked strangely in and also out of place in the house. His hair was long, black as pitch, and fell in neat and coiffed strands to his neck, leaving his pale face exposed. His eyes were green and wide with what looked like fear.

The pokémon standing before him; however, looked full of anger. Its body was composed of different shades of green with lengths of white hair that stuck out on top of its head like the petals of a flower. Its arms, thin and stem-like, crossed over its body and ended with a trio of different colored flowers. Its left was black and the right was a vibrant purple, each glowing with a hazy white light.

"Someone get help," Neo said through clenched teeth. "I don't have any medicine with me, find the guide!"

"O-Okay!" Garret said as he stumbled back out of the room and into the hall.

"Wait, I can help," the boy said, stepping up beside his pokémon.

Wallace stood, on shaking legs, and moved ahead of Neo. "Don't come any closer," he said with more courage than he felt he possessed.

The boy flinched back and took to twiddling his fingers in front of his chest. "I really didn't mean it, Atropa didn't either." The boy dropped to his knees and slung a small purple backpack off. He quickly unzipped it and pulled out handfuls of supplies. "Please, help his Lampent."

Wallace watched as the boy started chucking things across the room, many of them flying off course. He had no clue what any of them were, but a purple and white plastic spray bottle landed by his foot and Neo snatched it up without haste.

"It's a potion," Neo said as he ripped the spray nozzle off and dumped half of the thick liquid onto Lampent's quivering arm. Lampent's twitching slowed and its breathing calmed as Neo worked the liquid into its injury.

Wallace looked back to the boy in time to get smacked in the forehead with something soft.

"Oh! I'm sorry!" the boy gasped as he cupped his hands over his mouth.

Wallace didn't have time to see what it was before Neo grabbed it and began to unwind and wrap it around Lampent's arm. "Anything I can do?" he asked as he crouched beside Lampent again.

"Keep him away," Neo said, glaring at the boy as he worked expertly at tying the bandage around Lampent's wound. "And keep pressure on Lampent's arm."

Wallace nodded as he pressed down on the bandage, eyeing Lampent's ethereal face twisted in pain.

Neo switched the power on for his tablet and the moment it was on he snapped a picture of the boy's pokémon. "I've never seen a shiny roserade before, so of course I wanted to catch it," Neo said.

"Shiny?" Wallace asked.

Neo held the tablet out and showed Wallace a side-by-side comparison of a roserade with green and red flowers and one like the one before them, with purple and black petals. Wallace's eyes darted side to side, picking out other small differences in the coloring of the pokémon. "So shiny roserade are special?" he asked.

"Not just roserade, all shiny pokémon are special, Wallace," Neo said impatiently.

Wallace looked back to the boy who was gently rubbing the petals on roserade's head. "But this one has a trainer already," Wallace said.

"Atropa has a temper," the boy said. "I'm so sorry she attacked like that."

"I don't blame her," Neo said. "Finding a shiny in the wild is rare, but this seemed like the perfect place to find one. Deep within a secluded house in the middle of a private island, we didn't think anyone else would be here." Neo cleared the roserade images from his tablet screen and loaded up another app that Wallace had become familiar with. "So, who are you?"

"Oh, my name's Don Freelily."

Neo nodded as he tapped his screen. "2.34 seconds, very nice, Don."

"Uh, okay, thanks, I guess?" Don laughed as he scratched at the side of his head. "Are you guys students?"

"I'm Neo, this is Wallace," Neo said, gesturing to the floor. "We're first years."

Wallace bobbed his head, not wanting to take his hands off Lampent's arm.

"Exciting!" Don squeed.

The boy's attentions were shifted to the door as a thunder of footsteps came down the hall. Garret burst through the doorway first, hunched over and out of breath. "I brought... one of the... guides," he wheezed.

Wallace's looked back through the doorway as an older girl rushed in and bumped into Garret who staggered forward before he tripped and fell onto his face.

The girl gasped as she fingered back waves of brown hair, mixed with highlights, that fell across her shoulders and into her face. "I'm so sorry!" she gasped before she pushed a pair of thick rimmed black glasses further up on her sun kissed and golden tan face. "What seems to be the, um, problem?" she asked as her wide and oceanic eyes scanned the room.

"Who are you?" Neo asked, his eyes wide and mouth slightly ajar.

"Oh, um, I'm one of the safari tour guides." The girl made a small gesture at her appearance. She was dressed in a pair of denim shorts that exposed long and tanned legs, and despite the day's heat, she wore a small grey hoodie that exposed a grey tank top underneath. "Eleanor Ampora, here to help, I hope. But call me Ellie please," Eleanor said as she adjusted her glasses again over a smattering of freckles that spread across her face.

As she smiled, Wallace watched the skin on her forehead pucker around a small and glossy pink scar. "His Lampent is hurt, can you help us?" he asked.

"Oh..." Eleanor dropped to her knees and scooted between Wallace and Lampent, her hands moving carefully over the wound. "What happened?"

"It was an accident!" Don yelped.

Eleanor glanced up, seeming to notice Don for the first time, and gasped. "Belladonna, what are you doing here?"

"Belladonna?" Neo and Wallace asked in concert, their necks rolling around to face Don.

The pallid tone of Don's face burned pink with embarrassment. "Please, just Don. I beg you!" Beads of sweat formed on Don's forehead as he raised his hands defensively. "I just came to check some of the plants on the island. Atropa got scared and she attacked, I didn't do it on purpose, I swear!"

"Well, we should probably get back to the boats," Eleanor said, looking panicked at the wounded Lampent. "I didn't expect something so severe on my first day."

"It's about to rain, maybe Lampent should go back into its Poké Ball?" Garret said.

Neo nodded and recalled Lampent as they left. Garret led the way and Wallace and elgyem pulled up the rear after Don and Atropa left the library. On their way back through the mansion and to the entryway Don continued to mutter apologies to Neo who seemed to be brushing them off.

Outside, Eleanor paused at the front door, looking concerned for the fact the doors couldn't be locked, but didn't say anything about them. As the group crossed the high grass clearing and entered the brush, a voice coming from the thicket of trees caused Wallace to stop in his tracks.

"Growlithe aren't even native to this island."

As he focused his hearing he picked out the sound of numerous feet crashing through the trees and brush that led back to the mansion. Wallace watched the shape of Don's back slowly vanishing under the cover of the trees before he turned back and trampled towards the mansion, but stopped short of the clearing. He pulled apart a low hanging branch and peered through in time to see someone standing at the edge of the clearing, gesturing out from the forest.

Wallace strained his eyes to see what looked like a boyish girl holding up a branch as three people, two boys and a girl, emerged from the tree line and into the clearing. Wallace looked at the taller of the boys, the tallest in the group actually, with his nose buried in a book.

"The information surrounding this route is outdated," the girl leading the group said as she walked off towards the mansion. "The ones in charge of printing new material rarely delve far enough inside to obtain a solid understanding of the wildlife. I'd wager the book is mostly recycled from previous editions the university used."

The shorter of the girls, walking beside the tall boy, yanked her leg up out of the grass and slapped absent-mindedly at her leg. "Damn!" she cursed to the sky. "Well, Chara, we've 'delved' plenty far into this damn forest," she said, mimicking the guide, Chara's, stiff tone. "And haven't seen a growlithe yet. So why don't we head back to the beach and pick a pokémon that won't be a waste of time?"

"Simone, are you afraid of what waits inside?" Chara asked, craning her neck around to Simone as she gestured to the mansion.

"I'm not!" the other boy said as he hopped through the grass gleefully.

Simone's response was lost to Wallace under a clap of thunder that caused him to tip his head back. Black and purple clouds were slowly shifting across amber skies towards the mansion and its property. Wallace winced as he listened to the continuous low rumble of thunder before a booming clap shook the earth beneath him. The trees swayed together as a gale blew through the route, stirring up humid air that was heavy with the scent of incoming rain.

"It's going to storm and we'll be stuck out here. This is perfect."

Wallace looked back into the clearing, the four of them had reached the front doors and Chara was staring down at the chains Neo had left on the steps. Wallace felt his heart skip a beat in fear as Chara turned and stared out into the clearing. Despite being concealed by branches, Wallace still ducked out of sight.

"We can wait out the storm inside," Chara said. "It's lucky I found this house."

Wallace parted the branches from his crouched position and peered through to see Chara pushing open the front doors.

"You found this house, or you led us to one." Despite her harsh tone, Simone stomped forward through the doorway with the tall boy on her heels.

Chara stood to the side as Simone and the boy passed, still looking out into the clearing. "I knew there was a house out here, it says so in the guide book," she said before she shut the door.

Wallace's flared his nostrils as, for a second before Chara shut the door, he swore he saw a smile cross her face. Wallace remained crouched, his eyes fixed on the front of the house, expecting someone to come back out of the door, or for something to flash through one of the windows. But the longer he waited the worse a gnawing feeling in his stomach became. Something about the house scared Garret to the point he didn't want to step inside, let alone explore it.

"Aside from Don it was empty," Wallace said as he rubbed his fingers together, grinding the bones of his knuckles nervously as he thought back. "But the piano freaked Garret out." Wallace thought back to the piano, sitting in the abandoned parlor room when he looked to his finger. The memory came back to him as suddenly as if someone had flicked him in the back of his head. When he dragged his finger across the piano cover there was no dust. "If someone was living there would they keep the piano clean?" Wallace stood from his crouch and turned away from the house, staring down the manmade path his group had followed away from the mansion. "Did the sound of the keys freak Garret out?" he asked. "Sound."

Wallace climbed past the low hanging branch, back into the clearing, with the thought beating loud in his mind that the house wasn't as abandoned as it appeared. Taking the path across the clearing in long strides, Wallace reached the door quickly and tried the knob, unlocked.

Wallace pushed himself against the door, shutting it, and glanced to elgyem who sat quietly on his shoulder. "I've got a bad feeling, that's all," he said, more to reassure himself. Wallace wandered into the center of the entry and then off to the left, to the side of the house they hadn't explored earlier when he heard voices.

"And we just happened to stumble upon it? What an amazing coincidence," Simone said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

"It is amazing," someone replied forcefully, Chara, Wallace thought. "I've been staying in in Coumarine for some time now, and we're just a few miles from the city, I never noticed this place before."

Thunder broke the silence following Chara's words. Wallace paused at one of the windows to see veins of lightning ripping through the sky, illuminating the dark clouds with grey and purple hues. Rain drops, the first of many, pelted the clearing and the mansion's roof.

"Let's go in," Chara said, her voice coming from somewhere down the hall before Wallace. "We can wait in here."

"What if it's locked?" one of the boys asked. "Someone might own this place. The front door was open, what if they just stepped out.

"Well, let's find out."

Wallace rounded the corner in time to see Chara and the others standing at the end of the hall before a closed door. Wallace watched as Chara pushed on the door, but to no avail. She tried the knob, which seemed to turn smoothly, but the door didn't budge. She tried again, this time pushing against the door, turning the knob, and kicking at the bottom corner near the frame, and the door jutted open.

A rectangle of light spread out from the room and Chara stepped inside. After a few seconds the others followed her in and Wallace slinked down the wall, ears trained for any bits of conversation.

As he moved closer, Wallace listened to the sound of everyone's footsteps against the wooden floorboards. The sounds they made were hollow and flat, almost muted in the stale air. The closer he got to the room the more faded and hollow the sounds inside began to sound. The only thing that sounded real, sounded alive, was the storm brewing outside. Wallace tossed a look over his shoulder and saw through one of the windows in the entry, that rain drops were heavily pelting the ground now.

"Hello."

A voice coming from his blindspot caused Wallace to nearly jump out of his skin. He jerked back and whipped around to find Chara, the boyish looking girl poking her head out of the doorway.

"Hi," Wallace said, out of breath.

"Are you with the safari tour?" Chara asked, stepping out into the hallway.

As she moved out fully from the room, Wallace had the chance to view her up close. She didn't look prepared for the hot weather on the island, dressed in a baggy striped sweater and brown shorts. Her hair was a rich brown hue and fell past her chin in thick straight waves. Her features were soft, but with a certain edge to them, that made Wallace think her gender was often questioned growing up.

"Yeah, I'm here for the tour," Wallace said.

Chara's smile grew before she nodded back to the room. "So are we, we're waiting in here for the storm to die out, come in." Chara stepped back, arms held behind her back, and let Wallace pass.

Wallace kept his eyes on Chara before he entered the room that rose up three levels past the small entranceway, onto a tiled floor, laid in two separate patterns. Dust and silk webs coated nearly every surface Wallace's eyes fell on. It was all one room, but each quarter of it was decorated to function separately. As they climbed the steps to reach the raised level Wallace eyed a small kitchenette, not unlike the one he'd seen in the Berry Field's house, and a small receiving room opposite the kitchen.

Beyond the first two quarters, separated by a half-wall made of bricks, was a sitting area and on the opposite side, a bed. A large stone fireplace sat in the center of the far wall, the hearth looking cold and long unused. A maroon and gold rug led away from the fireplace and sat under a small wooden table with just one chair pushed in to its side. The floors and walls were covered in marks that appeared to be words, carved into the surfaces with a sharp object, in a language unfamiliar to Wallace. Spaced around the words, drawings had also been carved: pentagrams, crescent moons, arcane pictures, and interlocking depictions of the number six. All of it seemed to sprout from one source, a drawing above the fireplace.

Although it was drawn upon the rough face of bricks in some kind of dark marking, the drawing, a pokémon by Wallace's guess, was heavily detailed and frightening. At the bottom of the picture stood a small stick figure of a man, used to apply scale to the beast pokémon itself, that stood at least four times as tall at the figure. It had been drawn to have a thick serpentine body with twisted and gnarled wings. Spikes protruded from its body and tail while sharp clamp like fixtures sprouted from its back and wrapped around to the front of its body.

"Well, this just keeps getting better. Who are you?"

Wallace turned to find the girl, Simone, standing off to the side, arms folded tightly across her chest. She was easily a foot shorter than him, but Wallace didn't doubt, from her posture and tone, she made up for her stature in attitude. Her skin was dark and her hair even darker, silky black that fell straight down her back and shoulders over a simple white tank.

"Wallace Peters," he replied with his hand extended. "This is elgyem."

"Simone Mallory." Simone eyed his hand and the small pokémon on his shoulder before she quickly slapped his hand and then gripped it tightly, yanking Wallace in close to her. "I don't like this place," she said into his ear before she pushed him away and moseyed off.

"Would you rather wait outside in the freezing rain for the storm to stop?" Chara asked, closer to Wallace than he realized. "Or are you going to try and make it back to the beach without my help?"

"You're not an official guide." Simone glanced to the only window in the room, slick with rain. "It's just rain. Why don't we just leave?"

Wallace watched as Chara's gaze hardened as she looked on at Simone, who's eyes were on the door. But after a moment, Chara's eyes softened. "There's a high chance of flooding out here when the rain comes down hard enough. Leaving now is just asking for trouble. What's wrong with staying here?"

The taller of the two boys walked to the center of the room from one of the far corners, pausing at the window along the way. "It's getting nasty out there. I'm Ben Rider, by the way," he said with a short wave before he cracked open his book and moved off into another corner.

Wallace watched Ben retreat again, taking note of the boy's towering, but thin, body and his blue eyes and dark hair.

"Yo, I'm Dirk!" the remaining boy, around Wallace's height with dark skin, a shaved head, and squinted eyes said from his position squatted by the hearth. "Nice to meet ya!"

Wallace wandered to one of the two windows on the left wall and rubbed the palm of his hand against the grime on the glass. Sure enough in the few minutes since he'd been inside the rain had picked up. The once light drizzle was now a torrential downpour around the mansion. He watched the trees bend under the force of the wind that howled past the house. Even the sky above the house, that seemed exempt from the storm clouds, had darkened, the only light that pierced them were the streaks of lightning that trailed claps of thunder behind them.

"So it's settled," Chara said. "We wait here."

Simone looked to the doorway despondently. "Fine," she replied.

As they all resigned to the idea of waiting out the storm, Wallace watched everyone find a way to busy themselves. Dirk was attempting to get a large flatscreen television in the living area to turn on while Ben and Simone wandered through the kitchen, Ben trailing behind Simone who was furiously opening and closing cabinets. Chara dared to sit, and even recline, on the bed, seemingly without a care of what might already have been resting there.

Wallace took to the only remaining corner of the room, near the door, where he found a wooden cabinet. Kneeling in front of it he tried the doors, but after who knows how long of being shut, the doors didn't budge easily. He slammed his fist against them and yanked with a force that threatened to pull the entire cabinet down, before the doors squeaked open.

The more he thought about it, the less sure he was about why he'd followed them inside in the first place. If they were all students there was nothing to worry about. But now, not wanting to risk the storm, he'd gotten himself stuck in the mansion for who knows how long. Still, with nothing else to do he peered inside the cabinet in hopes he might find something to occupy himself.

Elgyem slid off his shoulder and climbed into the cabinet. Inside there was a series of shelves, the first filled with tattered looking journals, trinkets, and chipped plates and bowls that elgyem searched through with its psychic powers.

Glass bottles, caked with dust, filled the second shelf. Many were filled with fine powders and objects pulled from nature. Wallace tapped a few of the bottles, disturbing jars filled with leaves and twigs, while others were packed so full his interaction with them didn't do anything.

The bottom shelf was packed full of various items that he carefully sifted through. There were a pair of old boots, straps of leather, a small basket, and many long dull white sticks that were shoved to the back. Wallace pulled one of the longer ones free, but quickly dropped it once he realized he was holding onto a bone. He fingered his digits around a collection of the leather straps and used it to move aside most of the objects to clear his view to the back of the shelf where more bones were stacked. Although he'd seen bones of small pokémon, the bones lined in the shelf either belonged to something very big, or they belonged to a human. The one he tried pulling out was nearly as long as his arm. As he began shoving the items back into the shelf he moved the boots and felt something solid inside one of them. Wallace tugged down the nearest boot and let it topple over, a small white skull rolling out from the hole.

Wallace recoiled as the skull rolled to a stop, the eye sockets staring up at him. Elgyem floated out of the cabinet to inspect the skull as Wallace shook the leather from his fingers and slammed one of the doors shut. He moved to shut the other when a glint of light caught his eye. More leather, sewn together into a pouch, that held the handle end of a knife that stared Wallace in the face.

That time he did slam the door shut and rose to stand up. In an attempt to rationalize his discovery, Wallace wanted to believe the cabin once belonged to a hunter who kept the bones. But what reason could anyone have for storing away a skull, that looked human.

He looked across the room, everyone had moved from their places in the corners and had gathered in the center. "What's wrong?" Wallace asked as he rounded the corner and joined the others, elgyem hovering close behind. His eyes fell to the ground, where everyone else seemed to be looking. The table and chair had been moved and the rug pulled back, exposing a door in the floor.

"We found a trapdoor!" Dirk exclaimed, fists clenched in excitement. "I wonder where it leads, we should check it out."

"No, no we shouldn't check out the mystery trapdoor in the creepy house in the woods," Simone said. "Opening a trapdoor is the last thing we should be doing. It's at the bottom of a long list that starts with leaving."

"I agree," Ben said, pressing his book to his mouth.

Dirk shrugged as he crouched and grabbed at an iron ring bolted to the door. "I mean, what could be down there? It's probably like storage. I mean this place is pretty small, so whoever owned it must have kept the rest of their stuff down there, like a basement."

"You say basement I say murder room," Simone said, crossing her arms.

"I say we open it," Chara said with a shrug. She crouched beside Dirk and gripped the iron ring. The way Dirk pulled, the door didn't appear to be heavy, but Chara helped him lift it anyway.

Wallace moved in closer to the hole in the floor and was met with a wave of damp, cool air. The dim light from the cabin illuminated the start to a flight of steps that led down and away from the room. The five of them stayed still for a moment, staring into the hole and listening, for anything, but nothing reached them over the sound of the storm outside.

"I'm going first," Dirk said.

"Are you insane?" Simone snapped as she reached out and snagged a hand into the back of Dirk's shirt. "You're going to drop into a dark dank basement in a house in the middle of nowhere. Think about that for a second."

"What could go wrong?" Dirk asked, honestly.

"Everything could go wrong." Simone released him and kicked the trapdoor, slamming it shut with a hollow thud. "No one goes down there, are you people crazy? Chara, since you seem so comfortable here, can you tell us when the last time someone lived here was? And if maybe there's food somewhere?"

Wallace watched Chara's jaw tighten before her entire face relaxed, as if the tension melted from her facial muscles before she turned to the door.

"Let's look for the kitchen and find out," she said over her shoulder before she walked out into the hall.

Wallace watch Ben trail along happily while Simone passed him an exasperated look before she left. "Elgy," he said, extending his arm out.

Elgyem glided across the room and into the fold of Wallace's arm before they left behind the odd sitting room and followed the others down the hall and into the entryway. Rather than follow them as they spread out around the entryway, poking their heads in to the rooms to the sides, Wallace turned and crept up the marble stairs, eager to return to the library.

Despite just having left the second floor a short while before, with the storm raging outside, it might as well have been night outside. Wallace glanced up and down the dark landing strip before he took the path to the right that looped around the house.

Rather than make a beeline for the library, Wallace stopped at the first door he came to, opened ajar. He pushed the door fully open and reached around inside blindly for a switch. His fumbling fingers flicked a heavy switch that filled the room with buttery yellow light and illuminated a giant creature standing in the center of the room.

Wallace almost choked on his spit at the sight of a giant brown beast, stuffed, and posed to be angled at the door. Cobwebs hung from its extended limbs and filled the spaces between its sharp claws. Every space in the room seemed to be filled with the pelts and trophies of other creatures. Heads were mounted along the walls and something with a mane like fire was spread across the floor.

Wallace backed out of the room, not bothering to hit the light switch, and shut the door. "So maybe a hunter did live here, what do you think elgy?" Wallace asked.

"El..." Elgyem hummed as it flashed the red lights on its hands towards the end of the hall.

Wallace glanced back in time to see a small figure shuffle across the floor and around a corner at the end of the hall. Before Wallace could think of what to do elgyem was wiggling out of his arms and floating off down the hall after the shadow.

"Elgyem!" Wallace hissed as he glanced down the hall, back towards the staircase, before he followed after his pokémon.

Elgyem paused at the end of the hall before he turned the corner and stopped outside the door to the library. Wallace pulled the floating pokémon back into his arms before he turned into the doorway and stepped inside the. "Did you see what it was?" he asked.

As Wallace scanned the room, empty except for the walls of books, elgyem stuck its arms out and flashed the lights on its hands. A glint of light flashed against the far wall before a collection of books exploded out of their shelving.

Wallace jerked back in fright as the books fell to the floor, but something else was among them. Roughly elgyem's size, a small green creature with six legs skittered out from the maze of fallen books and stopped in the middle of the room. Two red mandibles clicked together under a pair of wide black eyes as its yellow and black legs twitched every few seconds.

"It's a pokémon, right elgyem?" Wallace asked, feeling anxious and a little scared.

The creature reared back and let out a high pitched screech before it shot a thin string from its mouth to the ceiling. Wallace watched the string attach to a light fixture before the creature shot off the floor and began climbing.

Elgyem wriggled free of Wallace's arms again and floated to the ceiling, following the six-legged creature as it climbed. Wallace watched elgyem flash the lights on its hands that then surrounded the creature who fell from the ceiling, but paused mid-air before it hit the floor, seemingly under elgyem's control.

Wallace backed up into a small table as elgyem floated closer and levitated the creature up to eye level with Wallace. "Elgy?" it hummed.

"Um, okay?" Wallace asked, his face inches away from the pinching mandibles of the six-legged pokémon whose legs were flailing in the air. "Do you want me to catch it?" Wallace asked, thinking about the bag of supplies in his back pocket.

Elgyem nodded and flashed the green lights on its hands.

Wallace pulled the folded up bag from his pocket and dug around inside for one of the miniaturized Poké Balls. Wallace enlarged it, and then quickly tapped it against the insectoid's underside.

There was a brief flash of light before the pokémon turned into light and was sucked into the ball. The ball vibrated and hummed in Wallace's hands before it settled. "Huh, that was easy," Wallace said as he looked over the Poké Ball and grinned at elgyem. "I sucked at throwing these, but maybe if you hold them still we can catch things easi-"

Wallace cut off as the Poké Ball split open with a burst of light that caused him to recoil and drop the ball. A ray of light shot from inside and hit the floor as the pokémon, pinching its mandibles furiously at Wallace, reappeared. "Elgyem, get it!" Wallace cried, rubbing his eyes.

Elgyem lowered itself to the floor, arms raised, but before it could restrain the pokémon, it fired bursts of web from its mouth that struck elgyem in the face, sending the psychic-type toppling over.

Wallace opened his eyes wide at the room to find the pokémon scurrying across the floor towards him. Wallace glanced back to the open door before he kicked it shut and leapt out of the pokémon's path.

"Spi, spi!" the pokémon cried before it shot another jet of web out.

Wallace flinched, but watched the glob fly overhead and attach to the ceiling, a thin strand connecting it and the pokémon. Wallace dove as the pokémon shot into the air. Wallace pressed himself against the wall adjacent to the doors. Wallace glanced to the left, where elgyem was struggling to rid itself of the webbing on its face, and then down to the end table by the door. A large glossy magazine lay on top, caked in dust. Wallace grabbed the magazine as the pokémon fired out a new web line and swung back down towards him.

Flicking his eyes between the magazine and the pokémon, Wallace rolled the magazine up and held it over his shoulder like a bat. With as much force as he could muster, Wallace swung and smacked the pokémon out of the air with a solid _**thump!**_ The pokémon's body blurred as it flew across the room and slammed against a bookshelf before it tumbled to the floor.

Wallace stared at the magazine and the fallen pokémon for a breath, feeling the adrenaline pumping through him, before he dropped the magazine and reached for the supply bag on the floor. He dumped out several Poké Balls before he lunged across the room to the pokémon and tapped its body with the Poké Ball.

Wallace shielded his eyes from the ensuing light and kept them closed until he heard the Ball stop moving, followed by a faint clicking sound.

A wicked grin spread across Wallace's face as he peered through his lids at the still Poké Ball. "I think I caught it!" he cried, glancing back to elgyem who looked irritated and still shaking webbing off its limbs. "Sorry, let me help."

Wallace grabbed up the Poké Ball and moved to help elgyem. He was halfway across the room when he heard the scream.

* * *

End of Chapter Eight

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ I apologize for the long gap between chapters, I have a list of excuses, but you probably don't want to hear them. **ShadedLyht** asked what Neo always seems to be timing, and as part of him collecting data on everyone/everything he meets, he times how long it takes for someone to respond to him after he initially speaks to them. So in the previous chapter that was 1.06/0.17 seconds for Garret and Dr. Stratton.

Lots of debuts this chapter. In order: **Chara** by **St. Elmo's Fire** , **Belladonna Freelily** by **shinyeeveeee** , **Eleanor** **Ampora** by **The Awkward Trumpet** , **Ben Rider** by **Gara316** , and **Simone Mallory** by **FinalPower.**

 **Question of the Chapter #7:** What are your thoughts about the abandoned/not-so-abandoned mansion?


	9. The Lost Boy

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Nine – The Lost Boy**

 _So the darkness shall be the light,  
_ _and the stillness the dancing. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace pressed his back to the wall, chest moving in an irregular pattern due to his quickened breaths, as he inched down the second story. He slipped the Poké Ball that contained his newly caught pokémon into his pocket and gave elgyem a fleeting glance over his shoulder.

His speed slowed as he reached the corner that led to the landing strip, before he could think about moving towards the staircase, he heard someone scream again. From his spot, huddled against the corner piece of the wall, Wallace could see the bottom of the stairs and a patch of the first floor's tile.

"No, no, no, please!"

A high and panicked voice caused Wallace to tense and press himself harder to the wall, wishing he could sink into it and vanish from the mansion. In the silence that followed the outcry, Wallace felt his heartbeat vibrating through the wall before something wet splattered against the tile below, red spray against a canvas.

A gushing sound and muffled, wet, coughs drove Wallace from his place at the corner and closer to the stairs in time for him to see Dirk's body fall into view. The boy fell backwards, his hands flying out ahead of him, before his head hit the bottom of stairs with a solid thud. For a moment Drik trembled, his hands twitching towards his throat, a jagged red slash sliced through the flesh like a wicked second smile, before he went still and his eyes lost focus on the ceiling.

Wallace's hands shot to his chest, fists clenched, as every part of him seemed to freeze, yet roar to live with the inching intensity of imminent fear.

"Wallace, I know you're there. Just come down, make it easy."

Wallace steepled his hands over his nose and mouth to keep himself from yelling. Still unable to get control of his breathing, Wallace took in air in panicked and fluttering spurts, his chest and stomach tightening and trembling. The voice that spoke to him didn't sound familiar. It sounded too deep and heavy to belong to Simone or Chara, it didn't sound like Ben and Dirk was...

"Wallace!"

Wallace tensed and, without thought, staggered forward, gripping the banister tightly to support himself. He took each step with a slow and deliberate step, his brown eyes strained ahead to get a look at whoever was below the moment they came into view. As he neared the bottom his eyes flicked to the floor as the blood from from Dirk's throat ran onto the marble. His mind replayed the sound of his own heartbeat over as the sound of Dirk's head hitting the stairs and as the sound of Andrew's head hitting the floor of his foyer, interchangeably.

His grip on the banister tightened as Wallace walked the rest of the way down. With his mind drowning in flashbacks, he was oblivious to the others in the entry.

Ben laid at the base of the stairs, his legs tangled with Dirk's. Wallace looked over his body for only a second, but noted the rise and fall of his chest, the only sign of life he needed at the moment. Simone stood in the center of the entryway, sweat beading across her dark skin and her eyes shut tight.

"S-Simone?" Wallace asked, but he stopped himself from moving forward when his eyes fell to Simone's neck. A stretch of white fabric was pulled taunt around her throat before it loosened and Simone's knees buckled. Her body instantly went limp before she fell into a heap on the floor.

The sound of her body hitting rattled Wallace to his core. He was barely able to comprehend in the sight of Chara standing where Simone was just a moment before, bloody knife in one hand and white rope in the other.

"Chara?"

Chara tossed the knife up and caught it by the handle before she aimed the sharp end at Wallace's head. A mix of relief and confusion flooded Wallace's already cluttered mind. The man who called to him was gone, but it was Chara he found at the bottom surrounded by bodies with a bloodied knife.

"Chara, what did – w-what happened?" Wallace asked, his mind working at a slower pace than his mouth.

"I did what I came here to do," Chara said in that same deep voice Wallace heard from the second floor. "Dirk was my only target, but the other two were tagging along."

"T-Target?" Wallace asked, his brain falling over itself trying to make sense of the words and voice coming from Chara's mouth. "You killed them?"

"Just Dirk," Chara said coolly. "For now."

"W-Why?"

Chara's body doubled over as she let out a high pitched laughed. She threw her head back and sighed before she looked off to the southern wall. "He wants to know why!" Chara pulled her arm back so quickly Wallace didn't have time to react before she hurled the knife directly at him.

In the time it took the knife to reach him Wallace thought about Chara's aim in the sitting room, how she hit the target every time. He was nothing but a target, a stationary target. Wallace clenched his eyes shut and waited for the blow, but seconds ticked by and nothing came.

His mouth fell open as he kept waiting, his ragged and shuddering breaths falling from his mouth before he opened his eyes and found the knife hovering inches from his face. Wallace's eyes scanned the knife, searching for an explanation, before he realized he was staring at the weapon through some kind of lens. Translucent and vibrant purple, an oblong barrier had formed before Wallace and had the knife lodged inside.

Wallace looked over the barrier in disbelief before he craned his head around to his shoulder. Elgyem was standing up, its arms held outwards and all digits on its hands lit up. Its usually wide and inquisitive eyes were narrowed, pinched, in concentration as the barrier began to waver.

"Elgy?" Wallace asked.

Elgyem pushed off from Wallace's shoulder and hovered before its trainer. The barrier slowly shrunk into a tight orb, Chara's knife suspended inside, before elgyem pushed forward and the orb followed suit. In a flash, the orb crossed the room and slammed into Chara, forcing her back against the far wall.

Wallace listened to the sound of fabric tearing as the knife cut across Chara's chest, ripping through the stripes of her sweater, before the orb vanished and the knife clattered to the floor.

"Heheh." Chara straightened up and grabbed at the shredded sides of her sweater, tearing them apart to expose her chest.

Wallace gaped at what lied underneath. Where he expected to find breasts, he found a bare and toned chest, and suddenly Chara's change in voice didn't muddle his mind any longer. "You're a boy," he said, his voice light.

Chara clapped his hands and grinned. "Congratulations," he said before he scooped up the knife.

Wallace didn't wait for Chara to wind up and throw the knife again before he yanked elgyem out of the air and bolted up the stairs. As he climbed the marble steps, two at a time, he registered the sound of Chara's footsteps thudding against the entry floor below before he reached the landing strip.

The house, just a few hours ago, had been a source of aged detail and furnishings, but now Wallace only saw the interior as a blur of colors as his pulse thundered so hard he felt it in the veins of his eyes. He whipped his head left and right, determining which way to go before he tore off down the left hall.

Out of sight from the staircase, Wallace opened the first door he came to and without bothering to check inside, he slammed it shut and slinked off further down the hall. Although he, Neo, and Garret had taken to exploring the house they didn't check everywhere and if there was one thing he was sure of the mansion had a balcony attached somewhere.

Wallace ducked off around a corner that looped to the back of the house in time to hear Chara's footsteps echoing down the hall. He didn't dare peek around the corner, but he strained to hear Chara taking the bait as he opened one of the doors. Wallace crept off down the back hallway, slowly turning doorknobs and peering inside as he went.

The third door he opened revealed a faded white bedroom with two large floor to ceiling windows that looked out onto a balcony, pelted by the downpour. He kept the doorknob twisted and shut the door, making as little noise as possible, before he darted across the room and tried the windows.

His hands fumbled through willowy curtains at the glass before he found another knob on what turned out to be a door. Still focused on the sounds around him, blocking out the rain, Wallace slipped outside and was drenched instantly as white lightning flashed through the grey clouds over the clearing.

Wallace glanced down to elgyem who was attempting to cover itself with its arms when a crack of thunder boomed over the house. Over the deafening sound, Wallace didn't hear the glass doors opening, but he reeled back on the balcony once he saw Chara peeking out from around the door onto the balcony.

"You've cornered yourself, little rat," Chara said, his eyes shining like the knife blade, the silver metal, scarlet with blood.

Wallace's breath hitched in his throat as he rushed forward, his eyes on the half of Chara's body that was still inside the room, and in the glass door's frame. Turning to his side Wallace pushed against the door with all his weight and slammed it up against Chara's shoulder. There was a sickening _crack_ and Chara stumbled back, the force of the impact causing him to drop the knife.

Wallace froze for a moment, in shock his idea worked, as Chara slipped out of the frame and dove for the knife. Wallace lunged over Chara and swiftly kicked the knife away, sending it careening towards the edge of the balcony.

"No!" Chara cried as he stretched his arms out as the knife slid to the edge and slipped between two rail posts. It balanced on the edge for a moment and Chara crawled towards it before it tipped and fell out of sight.

Wallace felt a weight ease off his chest seeing the knife vanish below, but that weight returned when Chara whipped back in his direction, the boy's face twisted with rage. Tangles of his brown hair matted over his forehead and shining eyes, but it was Chara's wicked and jagged smile that caused Wallace's stomach to hollow out.

"No more weapons," Wallace said, his voice trembling.

Chara reached a hand to his waistline and pulled a Poké Ball out, a design Wallace wasn't familiar with. "There are always weapons."

Wallace blanched as Chara chucked the Poké Ball into the air, his voice lost under the clap of thunder, before it broke open. Wallace darted back into the room, a flash, either lightning or the Poké Ball, illuminating him from behind before something heavy landed on the balcony.

As he reached the door, Wallace dared a glance back and found Chara stepping into the room, but it was the massive shadow behind him that panickedw Wallace. Leathery green skin was pulled taunt over a quadruped body that bulged with muscles. Vibrant pink petals, lined in white, sprouted around its neck and long wispy antenna-like strands twitched above its nose. The pokémon lowered its long extended neck as it ducked and stomped through the doorway and into the bedroom. A hollow, but powerful roar came from its mouth as it jutted its neck out to Wallace.

"Elgyem?" Wallace asked, gripping his only pokémon tightly. "D-Do you think we can win?" Wallace looked down to his ally who blinked the red digits on its hands fiercely. Wallace's jaw trembled as he thought about the miniaturized Poké Ball in his pocket, he didn't even know his new pokémon's name, he couldn't ask it to fight, could he?

Chara bent over in laughter and clapped his hands together. "Your own pokémon doesn't even believe in you, perfect! Meganium, use magical leaf!"

Meganium shook its head before the motion moved to the rest of its body, the petals around its neck swaying in turn before small glowing petals floated in the air around it. Wallace gripped elgyem tightly before he backed up and turned to the door, hoping it rip it open and flee, only to find it locked.

"No!" Wallace cried before he looked back.

Meganium roared again and with it commanded the petals. Streaks of green and white light shot across the room, slashing through furniture and the floor before they reached Wallace.

Wallace turned his back to Chara and Meganium and curled over elgyem when the first petal reached him. He cried out as it sliced through the shirt on his back, cutting through the skin on his shoulder like fire. Expecting the petals that came after to hurt less, Wallace braced himself for the pain, but each petal cut him like the first: clean and white-hot. Each one erupted a starburst of pain across his back before the petals slowed to a stop.

Wallace shuddered in pain as he pried his wet eyes open. Several petals had stuck into the door before him, thin as paper, but sharp like blades on their edges. "Ahh!" Wallace cried as he uncoiled from around elgyem, his shoulders were screaming, but a deeper pain crippled him. As he looked over his shoulder Wallace spotted a large petal, at least the size of his hand, sticking out of his shoulder.

Tears streamed down his face as he reached back and plucked the petal out. A mix of pain and relief flooding his senses as he dropped the bloody petal to the floor. "Are you okay?" he asked through choking sobs, his eyes filled with tears as he looked down to elgyem.

Elgyem nodded, its eyes glassy and wide with concern as it reached up and touched its hands to Wallace's slick cheeks. "Elgy..."

Wallace focused on elgyem's eyes and heard Chara's voice behind him growing fainter before the floor beneath him changed. In a flash of light the dusty white carpet of the bedroom had vanished and was replaced by the marshy earth of the yard outside the mansion.

Wallace looked up and found himself kneeling before the tree with names carved into it. "Elgyem, did you?"

Elgyem nodded and blinked the lights on its hands in a pattern.

"Thank you," Wallace said as he relaxed his bleeding and tense shoulders. The cold rainfall felt like sweet relief to his burning flesh, but the pain still throbbed through his body every second.

Suddenly, a pair of hands came down on his shoulders.

Wallace yelped, out of fright and out of pain, as the hands clamped down over his wounds. "GET OFF!" he cried as he fell forward onto the swampy ground. He rolled over, careful to stay off his back, and found Eleanor standing over him.

"Oh!" Eleanor was slack jawed and staring at her hands, lined with Wallace's blood. "Wallace, what – oh my – are you – are you bleeding?"

"Help me," Wallace said through gritted teeth as he scurried back against the tree, the bark grinding against his open wounds caused him to hiss out air through his teeth.

"What?" Eleanor asked as she crouched before Wallace. "What's wrong?"

"That maniac inside, he killed someone!" Wallace yelped as he weakly lifted an arm and pointed to the house.

"Killed?! What? Wallace, I came back to find you!" Eleanor said. "Why are you bleeding, who killed who? I'm so confused!"

"Wallace!"

Wallace's eyes snapped to the front of the house where Chara stood, Meganium stomping wildly behind him. "It's him!" he whimpered, struggling to get his feet under him.

Eleanor turned as Chara and Meganium stomped across the yard. "Oh my, Chara, w-what's happening?"

"It's kind of like a game of meowth chasing pikachu, are you up for playing?" Chara asked. "If not move and let me kill that one!"

"Dirk, that boy Dirk, he killed him," Wallace said. "Simone and Ben are inside too."

"Chara, what did you do?" Eleanor asked, her hand slowly inching to her waist.

Chara brought a hand to his neck and dragged it across his throat while he made a sickening slicing sound. "Hahaha! And you're next. Meganium, grass knot!"

Meganium roared and the petals the haloed its neck shimmered for a brief moment before the grass beneath Eleanor bloomed in full force and ensnared her legs. Eleanor shrieked and struggled to pull herself free, only for the grass to snake further up her legs and cover her knees.

Wallace listened to the mixed cry of Eleanor and Chara's maniacal laughter before Eleanor hurled something, a Poké Ball he guessed, into the air.

The light from the Poké Ball was muted in the rain, but what emerged struck the ground with force and completely blocked Wallace's view of Chara. It was larger than Meganium, with a blood orange pelt crossed with black stripes that looked like char markings from a fire. Its body rippled with muscles that tensed and flexed as its massive haunches moved to find stable footing on the marshy ground. Plumes of fluffy tan fur stuck out around its limbs and its tail which was crooked and bent down over itself.

"Krakaota, flamethrower!"

A bark, one that rivaled the boom of thunder, came from the pokémon's mouth before licks of fire shot out towards Eleanor. Despite the rain, Wallace picked up the distinct smell of grass burning before Eleanor came to stand beside the massive four-legged pokémon, easily dwarfed by its size. The pokémon turned and glanced down to Eleanor, who reached up and ran her hand up and down its snout. Wallace watched as its large eyes clamped shut and its snout crinkle as it bared its massive and curved fangs.

"Use sunny day, please," Eleanor said as she backed away from the quadruped.

Krakaota barked loudly at Eleanor before it raised its head to the sky, a glint of light forming in its mouth. Wallace watched as beams of searing light passed through the gaps in the pokémon's teeth before it opened its massive jaws and roared.

Wallace shielded his eyes as a ray of white light shot from the pokémon's mouth and into the sky. The light separated and exploded just as it reached the mantle of heavy grey clouds. The light from Krakaota's attack shattered across the firmament, fading the storm clouds into ones like white lace that Wallace had seen upon arrival to the island. The clouds swayed and parted in the middle of the sky above the clearing as the sun seemed to be renewed for a second wind.

Wallace felt the rain on his skin drying quickly, but the relief of warmth quickly turned into searing heat as the patches of his skin not protected by shade burned white hot. "Ahh!" Wallace yelped as he scooted back under the shade of the tree. Rays of sun were clearly visible, even in the harsh light Krakaota created, and phased across the clearing, illuminating Eleanor and Chara who stood beside their respective pokémon.

"The sunlight can only help me." Chara held his arms out to the side, as if he was still expecting rain to fall. "Meganium, use solar beam."

"Krakaota, extremespeed!" Eleanor said meekly as she pointed to the floral pokémon whose petals were glimmering.

Krakaota let out a threatening bark before its black and pointed claws jutted out from its paws. Wallace watched as the large pokémon's body was there before him in one second, and the next gone. A blur of orange sailed across Wallace's vision and struck Meganium.

Krakaota appeared, standing over Meganium as it reeled back from the strike and collapsed onto its back awkwardly. Krakaota raised one of its massive paws and slammed it down onto middle of Meganium's neck. The floral pokémon squirmed under the larger pokémon's weight, but was unable to roll its body to get back on its feet.

"Fire!" Chara cried out. "Blast arcanine's head off!"

The petals around Meganium's neck continued to glint with the absorption of sunlight before Meganium opened its mouth wide, aimed up at Krakaota.

Wallace watched a white ball of light gather and concentrate above Meganium's mouth, growing larger with each passing second. Just when it seemed the ball wouldn't expand any more, Krakaota's paw shifted and came swiftly down onto the side of Meganium's face. Meganium let out a pained wail as its head smacked the ground and the orb in its mouth fired.

A precise white ray of concentrated light shot from Meganium's mouth and fired off into the wooded around that surrounded them. Wallace listened to trees falling and stone being cleaved in the distance before the solar beam died down.

"Meganium, quick, use grass knot!" Chara commanded, hands clenched over his ears.

Megnium cried out as spots of the high grass in the field focused around Krakaota and began to bind its massive legs. Krakaota released Meganium and reared back on its hing legs, its body casting a long shadow across the clearing, as more of the grass and vines around them constricted its body. Krakaota thrashed from side to side, a snarling ball of fur and muscle, as it bared its fangs and gnawed through the coating of grass on its body.

Eleanor let out a piercing, terrified scream. Wallace tore his eyes from the sight of Krakaota burning away the strips of grass as its teeth became cloaked in fire, and saw Chara sprinting across the clearing for Eleanor. The guide reached for her waistline and fumbled at a string of Poké Balls there, but Chara wasted no time, instead he charged full speed for her.

"Elgyem, do the thing again!" Wallace yelled.

Elgyem lazily floated into the air before Wallace, its arms raised, and the lights on its hands blinking quickly. Wallace peered around the pokémon's small body in time to see a glint of purple light flash between Chara and Eleanor. The light flashed again before it spread into wall, a barrier, that Chara slammed directly into.

Wallace bit into his lip as he smiled, oddly pleased to see Chara falling back horizontally and vanishing under the high grass. He looked back to the pokémon as they parted, Meganium back on its feet and Krakaota free from the grass knot. Meganium hung its head at an odd angle that brought Wallace's attention to a gash across its flesh from Krakaota's claws.

Eleanor screamed again and Wallace split his attention to see Chara lunging out of the grass at the girl. Krakaota saw it too, and in its momentary distraction, Meganium attacked. The seconds it took Krakaota to turn to Eleanor, Meganium's petals drew in more of the harsh sunlight and it wasted no time in gathering light in its mouth before it fired point blank at Krakaota.

The light struck Krakaota's side, just under its arm, knocking the large pokémon off its feet and sending it tumbling towards the mansion. Krakaota writhed in mid-air, attempting to flip, but slammed onto the ground on its back. As Krakaota attempted to right itself as Meganium charged, its steps like booms of thunder under the earth.

Krakaota managed to get its feet underneath it just in time for Meganium to slam into it. The pokémon's long neck curled in as a ram that connected to Krakaota's chest and sent the quadruped reeling back into the mansion's side.

Meganium charged in again, but Krakaota's hind legs slapped the ground and it threw itself at the floral pokémon, its fangs curved like blades. Meganium veered right to avoid Krakaota, but it moved too slow for the giant beast whose jaws closed down around Meganium's neck.

Wallace flinched at the sound of a loud and grinding crunch before Meganium let go of a high, eerily human cry, and then it was flailing. Krakaota had a solid bite on its neck and was shaking its head, swinging Meganium's head around like a toy as it pressed down on its body with its paw, slowly bringing the pokémon to the ground.

Meganium continued to cry out as Wallace watched its body leave the ground. Krakaota, using all of its massive strength, pulled Meganium up by its neck and began to thrash the helpless pokémon around, using its own weight against it. Krakaota's jaws opened and Meganium soared across the clearing and smashed into a tree.

Wallace cringed at the sickening sound Meganium's back made upon contact and at the mad look in Krakaota's eyes as it darted across the clearing after its prey. Krakaota hovered over Meganium's form before it bit down, its jaws clamping over Meganium's neck before it gave a quick yank back, ripping off a chunk of Meganium's neck.

Krakaota dropped a chunk of flesh before it bit down again and Wallace listened to the snap of bone and a deep ripping sound before Meganium let out a deep cry.

Wallace watched in horror as Krakaota scratched at the fallen pokémon, nudging it with its paws and nose before it placed both paws on its body. Wallace thought, foolishly, for a second that it might try to rouse the floral pokémon, instead Krakaota pounced up and down on Meganium's body. A series of popping sounds burst across the clearing as Krakaota crushed Meganium's body under its weight.

Eleanor screamed again and Wallace had to tear himself away from the malice to see Chara plow into Eleanor. Eleanor's arms flew back as she was knocked off her feet and Chara lunged over her.

Wallace grunted as he pushed himself to his feet, blocking out the throbs of shooting pain in his back, before he darted across the clearing. He stopped short of the grass where Chara and Eleanor had fallen, their bodies a tangle of limbs. The shredded front of Chara's sweater swiped across Eleanor's face as she thrashed, whimpering, trying to bat her way free.

Chara's head snapped to the side, his eyes locking in on Wallace, before he reached to his waistline and pulled forth another knife, just as sharp and dangerous as the first.

"No!" Eleanor screamed, her voice cracking, as the sunlight glinted off the knife.

Wallace stood frozen to his spot as Chara dragged the tip of the knife down Eleanor's cheek. A thin dribbling line of bright red blood followed the blade as Chara pulled away close to her ear. Eleanor never stopped screaming, her body thrashing wildly in the matted down grass. The veins in her neck bulged and her face burned as red as her blood as Chara repositioned the knife over her other cheek.

Wallace watched as one second Chara angled the knife against Eleanor's tanned skin, and the next he was gone, blown off her body by a large orange blur.

A glint of metal, the knife, cartwheeled through the air before it vanished into the grass. Krakaota had slammed into Chara, the blow knocked the boy several feet away onto his back, struggling under Krakaota's massive paw.

Wallace listened to Chara's grunting cries as he tried to squeeze away from the arcanine. Krakaota lowered its head, breathing out a huff of air into Chara's face as it snapped at the boy's face, its teeth clashing together.

"Stupid mutt!" Chara spat before he rammed the heel of his palm into the pokémon's jaw.

Krakaota yelped as he reeled back, its hold on Chara slackening for a moment. Chara wasted no time in getting to his feet just as Krakaota came back down on all fours, snarling at the boy. Chara whirled back and let loose a quick backhand to the pokémon's jaw, a solid and loud crack.

Krakaota seemed only momentarily phased by the blow, but Chara doubled over his hand and began backing away from the beast. Wallace watched as Krakaota flashed its bloody teeth at Chara before a flash of red shot across the clearing and struck it. Eleanor's pokémon froze in place, moments away from devouring Chara, before it was recalled to Eleanor who was standing, one hand pressed to her cheek, slick with blood.

"A-Are you okay?" Eleanor asked weakly, as she stumbled forward. Her eyes fell to her hand as she pulled it from her cheek, still gushing blood. "I don't think I am –"

Wallace watched as Eleanor's entire body buckled, like a puppet whose strings had been severed, she crumbled, knees first, into the grass of the clearing.

Wallace wavered in his spot, wanting to check Eleanor, but his eyes fell across the clearing to Chara who popped back up from his place in the grass. Wallace's eyes fell to Chara's hand, the knife clutched firmly in it. Wallace watched the boy's murderous eyes as they darted between Wallace and the fallen Eleanor before he took off from his spot, heading straight for Eleanor.

"Elgyem!" Wallace cried as he took off, much slower than Chara, also heading for Eleanor.

Through the corner of his eye, Wallace watched elgyem flashing across the clearing, closing the distance to Eleanor faster either he or Chara were. In one final glitch, elgyem rested above Eleanor's back, its stubby arms touching down on her shoulders.

Wallace pumped his legs faster as he watched Chara practically leaping through the tall grass towards Eleanor. In one final ditch effort to reach her first, Wallace threw himself forward and soared across the clearing, landing just feet from Eleanor's still form.

Listening to Chara's feet crunch through the grass, Wallace crawled forward just enough to reach out and lay his hand on Eleanor's shoulder.

For a brief second Wallace felt weightless as the sound of Chara's breathing neared him, but then instantly grew fainter. The rough and scratchy grass of the clearing was replaced by the shifting and fine feeling of 0 0 00sand as the three of them reemerged on the island's beach.

Wallace found himself staring up at the silver grey hull of one of the motor boats that had brought them to the safari zone and a salmon pink sky. Faces popped out over the edge of the boat, Neo and Garret were among them, all staring down at Wallace and Eleanor with curious eyes.

Wallace tried to lift his head to speak, but his mouth was gummy and his head felt like it weighted a ton. Voices started up around him and melted into one long hum in his ears as the beach faded to black.

* * *

Wallace woke to white. His surroundings were pristine, white walls that bounced sunlight around as if the walls were made of mirrors. A lone window sat in the center of the wall behind him, bursting through with sunlight. The room smelled clean, like bleach and linen air spray. His hands spread and clenched at the down bedding beneath him. His movements must have startled someone because from the far corner Wallace heard a soft gasp before something fell and clattered against metal.

The room was small, barely big enough for the bed, a table, a stool, and a row of counters that were attached to the wall opposite Wallace. A door, placed in the center of the adjacent wall, opened and a woman with a bun of tightly coiled light red hair stepped in.

"Good morning, Wallace," she said, her voice the kind you heard in commercials for children.

"G-Good morning, Nurse Joie."

Wallace craned his neck back to find a familiar face hiding in the corner. Arlette, the girl he'd met in Camphrier Town, was in the room, struggling to gather up fallen supplies off the table. She was dressed in overalls and a long white coat with a red banana tied awkwardly over her head.

The nurse, wearing a light pink dress and a white coat to match Arlette's, smiled as she approached the bed. "Hi, Wallace. I'm Anna Joie, the on-site nurse for the university. You're in our Health and Wellness Center right now."

"How'd I get here?" Wallace asked, his throat dry and scratchy.

"You were brought in last night on a boat returning from the safari tour," Anna said as she reached past Wallace and came back with a large blue plastic cup with a straw sticking out the top. "Do you remember any of that?"

Wallace eyed the nurse as she guided the straw to his mouth, but clamped his eyes shut the moment the ice cold water hit his tongue. The water chilled his mouth and seemed to put him back at ease as the fog of his mind lifted. "I remember being on the island, running," he said before clearing his throat.

The nurse nodded to Wallace before she looked to Arlette. "Students and the other guides took you and one of our upperclassmen, Eleanor, into the boat and brought you back after they realized the two of you were injured," she said.

Wallace shifted on his back as the memory of Chara and his Meganium flashed back in his mind. There wasn't any pain, but he could still feel the slice of Meganium's petals through his back. "Chara," he said softly.

Anna nodded and regarded him with a small, sad, smile. "Our department of public safety is looking into Chara and what happened on the island. They'll be by later to speak with you." Anna rubbed her hands across her knees before she stood and looked to Arlette. "Until then, we've patched you up. Thankfully your injuries weren't severe and all it took was ointment and some bandages, but you'll be fine. You're welcome to leave whenever you feel up to it. Just make sure to check out at the front desk."

Wallace nodded with a smile as Anna left and the silence filled the room again as he looked back to Arlette. "Hi," he said. "I remember you. We met in the Hotel Camphrier," Wallace said as he scooted up into a half sitting, half leaning, position. "Arlette, right?"

Arlette bobbed her head as she fingered back a strand of hair and retreated further back into the corner behind the table. "I'm sorry. I-I don't remember you," she said, sounding ashamed.

Wallace frowned before he remembered he looked a little different the last time they met. "I changed my hair a little bit," he said as he took off his glasses and found the room to be hazy and blurred.

"Oh. You're that Wallace." she said.

Wallace slipped his glasses back on and nodded. His eyes drifted from Arlette to countertop where a chunky white candle sat, but the longer he stared the more he realized it wasn't a candle, unless candles came with an eye and a mouth.

Arlette caught Wallace's eyes and she reached out to pet the candle. "This is Chandler," she said softly. "My litwick."

"I've never seen one before," Wallace said before another realization hit him. "My elgyem!"

Arlette jumped a little on the spot before she rushed to the door and out of the room. Wallace watched the small glass window in the door before Arlette darted back inside, elgyem in her arms and a Poké Ball in hand. "S-Sorry, Nurse Joie was keeping them outside," she said as elgyem wiggled free from her arms and flew to Wallace.

"Hi," Wallace said, his voice cracking a little as elgyem buried itself into the crook of his neck, humming all the while.

"T-They were a little tired, but we healed them," Arlette said as she placed the Poké Ball beside Wallace on the bed and retreated to the other side of the room.

Wallace rubbed a pattern into elgyem's back as the small pokémon wrapped its arms around his neck. "Thank you," he said as he grabbed the Poké Ball and tapped the locking button.

The already bright room filled with even more light as the Poké Ball broke up and from it Wallace's six-legged pokémon emerged into the room. Full of as much energy as it had when Wallace found it, the pokémon skittered back and forth across the bed, snapping its mandibles in every direction before it crawled up Wallace's stomach.

"They miss you," Arlette said. "Are they young?"

"Elgyem hatched the other day. I caught, um – " Wallace said before he realized he had no clue what pokémon he'd caught at the mansion.

"Spinarak," Arlette said. "It's a spinarak. Have they eaten?"

"Eaten?" Wallace asked, his eyes flicking back to Arlette who was tentatively rubbing Chandler on the head. The though hadn't occurred to him.

Arlette grabbed a faded purple bag from beside the counter and dug around inside before she pulled out an opened bag of pokémon food that had been crumpled and rolled down to keep it closed. "You can have it, if you want." she said softly as she placed the bag down on the bed.

Wallace watched how quickly she retracted back to her side of the room and how her eyes never stayed on him for long, always finding something else in the room to look at. She reminded him a lot of Garret as he unrolled the bag and shook out a handful of small pellets for elgyem and spinarak. It took some coaxing to get it elgyem to pry away from Wallace's neck, but eventually elgyem slid down onto the bed and ate beside the overzealous spinarak.

The students watched, in awkward silence, as the two pokémon devoured the last of Arlette's food. The only sounds came from the snapping of spinarak's mandibles and from elgyem who let out soft robotic sounds of disappointment once all the food was gone. "I'll add food to my list to things to buy," Wallace said as he rubbed elgyem's head.

"Elgy, elgy!" Elgyem floated around Wallace's shoulders before it perched onto his shoulder.

"Trainers nickname their pokémon, right?" Wallace asked.

"You don't have to, but it helps you develop a bond." Arlette fiddled and poked at a patch of fabric at the end of her coat sleeve.

"I don't know much about pokémon. How do I know if it's a boy or a girl?" Wallace asked.

"They're both boys," she said.

"How can you tell?" he asked, he'd barely had time to check spinarak out and elgyem looked about as genderless as they come

"It showed up when we healed them," she said dryly, looking somberly at her coat that was too big.

"Boys," Wallace said as he pressed his chin to his shoulder, looking through his peripheral at elgyem.

Elgyem wiggled on his shoulder before it stood up and prodded Wallace's cheek with its glowing hand. "Elgy?" he asked, the illuminated digits of its hands glowing against Wallace's skin.

"Big eyes, big head, greenish blue, glowing hands," Wallace said as he listed off descriptors of elgyem, trying to find something that rang out to him as an appropriate nickname.

"M-Maybe scan it with your Pokédex," Arlette said.

"I don't have one," Wallace said.

"Oh. I'm sorry, I-I just assumed."

"Assumed what?"

"I-I just thought you were one of those students." Arlette pressed her chin to her chest and looked off across the room while her hands locked and her fingers played with each other in front of her. "Y-Your friends were here, one of them left his laptop."

Wallace followed Arlette's hand as she gestured to the table where he found Garret's laptop sitting closed. Careful not to jostle elgyem too much, Wallace reached back and pulled the laptop into the bed with him. As he booted up the laptop, Wallace watched Arlette turn her back to him in the act of gathering up all her supplies into her bag and preparing to leave.

Without any kind of password protection on the laptop, Wallace quickly made his way to , the thing that had been gnawing at his mind since the bonfire.

Dr. Stratton had announced the site to a majority of the first year class about two days, but according to her the site had been running the entire day of the bonfire. As he scrolled and clicked through the website, Wallace discovered that the site had been launched around four o'clock Friday morning, and two days later had received over 2,000 comments and crashed eight times.

The website was really just one page. **FIND ANDREW GATES** sat boldly at the top above a navy blue background. Below it, a slideshow of pictures scrolled from side to side. The string of photos were all submissions from other visitors to the site. Andrew was the focal of all the photos, whether he was the only one in them or not, the camera only seemed to focus on him. Below the slideshow, walls of text detailed Andrew's life. It started with his upbringing in Lumiose City, his decision to become a trainer, and the ups and downs of his life that took him through six regions, all before it culminated in the details of his disappearance that seemed to be word for word from a news broadcast.

The website creator included a phone number under the site's text, urging visitors to call it if they had information regarding Andrew's disappearance. But below that was what glued Wallace to the computer. Other students, and maybe even faculty, were submitting comments about Andrew.

Wallace refreshed the page and scrolled to find several new white boxes filled with text below the hotline number. As new posts came in, the older ones were pushed to the bottom before they were catalogued into the site's memory, which was still viewable by toggling through different page numbers. With 233 pages filled with comments, and twelve comments per page, there were nearly 2,800 comments racked up so far. Wallace refreshed the page again before he read the comment stream:

 _LOL hes not missing, daddy just decided not to pay his tuition_

MrMewtwo seconds ago

 _he's a cutie_

anonymousditto seconds ago

 _WE LOVE YOU, ANDREW!_

krabbyKatie seconds ago

 _i have a link to my blog about missing person theories in kalos, anyone interested?_

corygon-Z seconds ago

 _he is tooo skinny, the wind blew him away, if you find him tell him to eat something_

milTANK00 4 minutes ago

 _I've got Andrew tied up in my basement._

DracoMeat 6 minutes ago

 _praying for his family and for his safe return, Arceus guide him._

Sincerelysinnoh 8 minutes ago

As he scrolled, Wallace realized most of the comments were garbage, some wished Andrew well, but most were pointless. But he did find one that caught his eye:

 _I hope you're safe._

Lita 25 minutes ago

Lita. The same name on tons of letters in Andrew's inbox and the same name on a note he found with the set of keychain charms in Andrew's room, and now there, in a stream of trollish comments. Wallace rolled the name around in his head, wracking his brain to recall if Andrew ever mentioned anyone named Lita to him or during any of his streams.

"I-I'm sorry, I have to go," Arlette said, pulling Wallace's attention out of the computer.

Wallace looked up to see her standing by the door, bag hanging off her shoulder and Chandler cradled in her arms. Before Wallace could say anything she swung the door opened, and while looking back to Wallace, slammed directly into a woman entering the room.

Arlette's bag crashed to the floor, spilling a few supplies over the glossy white tile, and Wallace watched as the girl fumbled not to drop Chandler who cried out after the collision. Arlette sunk to her knees as she grasped Chandler firmly in her arms and sighed.

"Sorry about that," the woman in the doorway said as she brushed off her clothes. "You alright?" she asked, but made no effort to help Arlette up.

The girl whimpered her reply as she stood on wobbly legs and backed up to the counter. "F-Fine."

The woman nodded before she reached into the fold of a black overcoat that hung off her lithe body. "I'm Detective Minako Fujioka," she said as she pulled a fold up badge out and flashed it two the room.

Wallace's skin pricked with anxiety at the sound of the woman's voice. Instantly he was flashed back to his return home, his father had met with the same detective who worked on Andrew's case. Despite her stern tone and official looking badge, the woman looked more like a student. She was no taller than Wallace, with a young and round face, tanned skin, and a bob of white-blonde hair that fell around her face.

"A-Are you here with public safety?" Arlette asked, shrinking away from the detective as she moved into the center of the room.

"No, I've been assigned to the Andrew Gates missing person case," Minako said as she pulled back one side of her coat to reveal a brown messenger bag hanging by her hip. She opened the top flap and reached around inside before she pulled out two small cards. "I'm following a lead."

Wallace trained his eyes on the woman's face once she turned to him and held out the card, the same one he'd seen in his kitchen at home, marked with her title and name. The woman regarded him with a short smile that didn't reach her eyes, but Wallace tensed under the gaze of eyes that didn't appear as youthful as the rest of her. Light hazel eyes that looked tired and weary bore down into Wallace, as if hoping to squeeze a confession out of him through ocular interrogation alone.

Just when Walalce felt like he couldn't bear to keep eye contact going with the detective any longer, that he might break away and somehow reveal his guilt, Minako turned her attention to Arlette. Wallace unclenched his fists and let out his first breath since the detective entered the room as she strode away from his bedside.

"Are you Arlette Bellerose?" Minako asked as she opened her coat again and dug around inside her bag.

"Y-Yes, that's me," Arlette said.

Even though her body was hidden from view behind the detective, Wallace could tell she was scared by the way her voice quivered through every syllable.

"Do you know this boy?" Minako asked.

Wallace eased up in bed, sitting up completely as he strained his neck to see what Minako had pulled from her bag. His eyes flicked to Arlette's face, barely visible over Minako's shoulder, and full of increasing panic.

"A-Andrew, I-I knew him," Arlette muttered.

Wallace's breath caught in his throat as his arms began to tremble from holding himself up. Minako must have heard the change in his breathing, because she turned slightly and tossed him a cold look over her shoulder.

"Maybe we should do this in private," Minako said as she turned back to Arlette.

"D-Do what?" Arlette asked as she attempted to move as far away from the detective as possible by pressing herself against the counters.

Minako glanced back to Wallace again before she turned and blocked Arlette from his sight. "While looking into Andrew's activity for the week prior to his disappearance we uncovered messages between him and a young woman named Lita. We did some digging and found many Litas in the trainer registry, but none who lived in a proximity we mapped out based on the information we pulled from the messages."

Wallace's arms went slack as Minako's words hit him. His stomach tightened as what felt like ice water pushed through his veins.

"So we tracked the trainer ID that was registered to the messages sent by Lita and they came back to an Arlette Bellerose," Minako said. "Registered as a student at Radix University, the same university Andrew was applied to. The more we dug into you, we learned that you were in Camphrier Town around the time Andrew disappeared. In fact, as we kept digging we found out that Andrew's trainer ID was used in the Camphrier Pokémon Center days after he was supposed to have vanished. Yours was also used that day, 2 hours before to be exact."

"B-But that – that – that doesn't –"

"Save it, Ms. Bellerose," Minako said as she reached behind her and pulled something off her waistline.

Wallace listened to the clinking of steel as Minako approached Arlette who had started crying, loud and choking sobs.

"Arlette Bellerose, you are under arrest in connection with the disappearance of Andrew Gates," Minako said.

Wallace throat tightened and his vision slurred as Minako moved around to Arlette's back, revealing a pair of shining silver cuffs fixed around Arlette's thin wrists. His eyes darted up Arlette's body to find her face, tears streaming down her already slick cheeks and her face twisted in horror.

Minako nodded to him before she ushered Arlette towards the door, leading her by the elbow, and rattling off a series of rights before the two left Wallace in the infirmary.

Wallace fidgeted in his spot on the bed, his back to the window that sunlight still streamed through, though no longer pleasant. The light that hit his skin burned his uncovered flesh, and baked through his shirt to scorch his back. He tried to occupy his hands by petting spinarak, who had settled into his lap, but found himself to fried to even focus on that task.

His hands trembled nervously as he listened to the detective speaking in the hallway to what sounded like Nurse Joie. Wallace closed his eyes as he felt a vein bulging in his neck, information, thoughts, and words, all flooded his mind. Arlette knew Andrew. Arlette was Lita. Lita and Andrew were close. Wallace balled up his fists tight to the point his nails, untrimmed since he left home, dug into the soft flesh of his palm.

Wallace hunched over on the bed, his chest suddenly feeling tight, he clenched his teeth as what felt like a cry worked its way up into his throat. But rather than a whine, what escaped his lips was a laugh. Light and buoyant, Wallace let out a carefree laugh that bounced off the walls around him. Soon his laughing turned deeper, more guttural as tears fell from the corners of his eyes.

"Elgy?" Elgyem shifted on Wallace's shoulder as the boy rocked back and forth, holding his stomach as he let out full and bellowing howl of laughter.

Wallace disregarded his pokémon's concern as he ran out of air and his laughing because nothing more than an airy snicker, a wicked smile growing across his face.

* * *

End of Chapter Nine

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Although she was mentioned in a previous chapter, this time we had a true debut of **Detective Minako Fujioka** by **The Ruffler.**

 **Question of the Chapter #8:** Who do you think The Lost Boy, of the chapter title is?


	10. Trust No One

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Ten – Trust No One**

 _Most of the evil in this world is done  
_ _by people with good intentions._ _\- T.S. Elio_ _t_

* * *

Following Arlette's arrest, the remainder of Wallace's stay in the Health and Wellness Center was punctuated by vivid and haunting dreams. Despite sleeping through the night after returning from the safari, thoughts of Chara, Dirk, and Eleanor's arcanine prodded his resting mind the way Krakaota jostled Meganium: with child-like enthusiasm in the hope of causing a reaction. The result was a night of restless sleep in cold sweat before the Department of Public Safety visited him early the next afternoon.

A man and a woman, both dressed in uniforms similar to the ones worn in Lumiose, with a full team of six pokémon attached to their hips, came and asked a long list of questions, none of which Wallace answered out loud. Do you want to contact your parents? _No._ Is there anyone we should call? _No._ The university will bill you directly for the check-up and for your stay in the infirmary, is that okay? _Yes._

Along with their follow-up questions the pair explained that Eleanor had woken up during the trip back to campus and passed along everything Wallace had told her. Another motor boat was soon dispatched from the main island and discovered Simone and Ben hiding in the mansion, awake and terrified.

Chara's Meganium and Dirk were both found, lifeless, in the entryway and clearing respectively, where they had been left. Chara; however, was the only missing piece. And although the news didn't surprise him, the thought that Chara was still at large, and possibly near the university, only made things worse.

Would you like to see Eleanor? _No._ Do you need to stay here another day? _No._ Are you feeling capable of starting classes tomorrow? _No._ Do you feel safe? _No._

* * *

By early evening, the sky above the university burned fiery orange and dissipated into lush magenta clouds as Wallace climbed the steps into the ICO. The moment he rounded the entry corner, Wallace was stopped in his tracks by someone called out to him.

"Wallace!" Garret cried out.

Wallace whipped around quickly, one hand snapped up to secure elgyem on his shoulder from falling and the other pressed a plastic crate to his waist. Sitting around the low coffee table in the ICO lobby, Garret, Neo, and Ignatius seemed to be in the middle of a card game.

"What's going on?" Wallace asked as he glanced to the table, littered with playing cards and piles of potato chips that were gathered in front of the boys.

"Ignatius stopped by with your order," Garret said as he awkwardly shuffled his hand on his lap.

"My order?" Wallace asked.

"The order you placed at the bookstore," Ignatius said, "It was a long list, but pretty standard. I got most of it done Friday after you left." Ignatius pulled up the bottom of his shirt and exposed a studded belt lined with Poké Balls. "My team helped deliver it, but it's a good thing you showed up. I can't really leave until I get you to sign for it all." Ignatius reached down past the table and pulled up a clipboard that he held out to Wallace. "Looks like everything was delivered, so your total comes to $164,750."

Neo whistled at the price, his eyes slipping off his tablet's screen for a moment.

Ignatius' smile fell for a second as he gave Wallace a comforting look. "I know it's a lot, but I made sure to get you some discounts, but you were expecting to get quite a lot. So we have some options as far as repayment goes. We can add the total onto your tuition or you can pay it separately and with the standard 48 month plan it would be about $3,432 a month. I would just go with the tuition option, you'll have longer to pay it off. But we will need an initial payment from you." Ignatius held out a small card reader, similar to the kind Wallace had seen in the Poké Mart of Camphrier Town.

"It's fine, I'll pay the full amount," Wallace said as he pulled his wallet out and then his trainer ID. He held the card over the reader, waiting for Ignatius to enter the amount.

"I did say $164,750," Ignatius said, his brows furrowed as he punched in the total price.

Wallace nodded with a weak smile. "I know," he said as he swiped his ID through the reader. He watched the small rectangular screen blink with various codes before ACCEPTED flashed across the screen. As he slid the card back into his wallet he mentally thanked Izumi again.

"Do you want a receipt?" Ignatius asked as a thin sheet of paper uncoiled from the reader.

"No thank you," Wallace said.

Ignatius crumbled the paper up before he nodded and began to shuffle around the table. "I think I'll be on my way now."

"B-But what about our game?" Garret asked, looking forlornly down at the table.

Ignatius paused at the corner of the lobby and glanced over his shoulder. "Maybe some other time. I need to get ready for the tournament tonight."

"Tournament?" Wallace asked as he glanced between Ignatius and Neo, surprised the latter hadn't already mentioned it to him.

"Like the bonfire it's another tradition," Ignatius said. "It happens the Sunday before classes start and all students are eligible to participate within one year range, so freshman can battle sophomores, but not juniors."

"Is it m-mandatory?" Garret asked.

Ignatius turned back to the lobby and grinned. "No, if they call your name and you don't take the field they'll just call someone else. I toured the campus last year during the tournament so I know a bit of how it works, but even if you don't want to battle you should still come and watch me take home the first year title.

"Not likely," Neo said with a scoff. "There are 304 first year students and the odds that your name will be chosen for a bracket that only includes five first years are less than 1 perfect. But, even if your name was chosen, the odds that you'll win are even slimmer. Not to mention, I plan to win if my name is chosen."

Wallace watched as Ignatius bowed and started to walk backwards towards the exit. "Well, we'll just have to see, won't we?"

"Such hope," Neo said followed by a soft laugh. "But surely the winner of the tournament for each year will hold a special place in the class roster, which is why if the opportunity arises I have to claim it. What do you think, Garret?"

"I don't think I'll battle if I'm chosen," Garret said. "I'm still amazed that you just paid that entire bill, Wallace, are you rich?" Garret looked to the table where Ignatius had left the crumbled receipt paper.

"I was wondering the same thing," Neo said. "Whenever we eat off campus, you're paying," he added. "But more importantly, Wallace, how is Eleanor?" Neo asked, rocketing up from his seat on the couch.

"What?" Wallace asked, shifting which arm he held the crate with as he shifted uncomfortably on his feet. The only thing thinking about Eleanor did for him was serve to remind him of her vicious arcanine. Did she know it would attack and kill when she released it? "How would I know?"

"You were in the infirmary for a whole day with her and you never thought to check on her?" Neo asked, his eyes narrowing to slits.

"No," he said plainly. "But I'm glad you realized I was there too, I'm fine by the way." Wallace glanced down to a large crate in his arms before he reached down and pulled out Garret's laptop. "Here," he said before he held the device to Garret.

"Oh, I forgot I left it," Garret said quietly as he placed his hands along the edges and pulled it into his lap. "How are you feeling?" Garret asked as he straightened up in his chair.

"What's the rest of the stuff you're carrying?" Neo asked.

Wallace glanced back into the crate, to Arlette's bag and Chandler's Poké Ball, both left behind. "Another student's things, I have to turn them in to our AD or take to them to their roommate, I don't know.

"Arlette's?" Neo guessed.

"How'd you know?" Wallace asked, his eyes growing wide.

"Her arrest is all the campus is talking about," Neo said cooly as he booted up his tablet and took his seat.

"A-Arrest?" Garret asked.

"Some students were at the Health and Wellness Center when it happened. They saw her being led away in cuffs. I was hoping you'd provide me with an eye witness account, Wallace," Neo said as he adjusted his glasses.

Wallace pursed his lips and slowly shook his head. "Can't help you," Wallace said as he crossed the room and rested the crate on the vacant counter. Elgyem took the opportunity to climb down and began toying with the items on the desk.

Neo frowned, but quickly shrugged it off. "Maybe when she comes back I'll ask Arlette myself."

"Comes back?" Wallace asked as he threw a look over his shoulder.

"I don't know the details of her arrest, but I doubt the warrant came through on high merits. Probably pushed through last minute as a way to get information. There's no way she had anything to do with Andrew's disappearance," Neo said.

Wallace clenched his jaw as he turned his shoulders square to Neo and propped himself against the counter.

"W-What makes you so sure?" Garret asked, taking the words out of Wallace's mouth.

"I've been waiting for someone to ask that." Neo grinned as he leaned over his tablet screen. "After you ditched me at the bonfire," he said with his a hard glance at Wallace. "I had some time to check out and I was bored so I downloaded the database of submitted photos, with new ones coming in through a sync feature that happens every 14 minutes. So, this morning, when I was using the bathroom –"

"You take your tablet in the bathroom with you?" Wallace asked as he glanced to elgyem who was using his powers to juggle a stapler, a roll of tape, and a collection of pens.

"Of course. What kind of inquisitive mind would I be if I let new data catch me by surprise while I had my pants down?" Neo said before his green eyes flicked up and around the room, a sly grin spreading across his face. "Literally."

Garret let out a small chuckle, but coughed to cover it when he saw that Wallace wasn't laughing.

"Anyway, I was scrolling through the photos this morning and found one of Arlette and Andrew." Neo sat back on the cough and held his arm out for the others to see.

Garret leaned over to see as Wallace inched across the room to see a photo of Arlette and Andrew, a recent photo judging by their appearances, standing before the fountain Wallace recognized from Camphrier.

"How does this prove she's innocent?" Wallace asked. "They took Arlette because she was in Camphrier around the same time Andrew was, according to logs pulled from the Pokémon Center," Wallace said in a broken voice as he committed every pixel of the photo to memory.

Arlette's eyes were wide as they gazed up at Andrew, who regarded her with the biggest smile Wallace had ever seen on his friend's face. Their arms were wrapped around each other's back as the posed before the gushing water fountain.

"I knew I could count on you, Wallace," Neo said. "If that's the evidence against her all they have to do is check the cameras in the Pokémon Center to see if it really was Arlette and Andrew who were there."

"What d-does that mean?" Garret asked.

"The computers can be accessed by just by using a trainer ID number, you don't always need the physical card. So if either of them let a friend use their number that could explain why, more than likely, Andrew's ID pinged there. It's probably a friend who didn't know Andrew would be declared missing and is now too scared to come forward," Neo explained. "I don't think Arlette had anything to do with Andrew's disappearance, I think she probably wants him back more than anyone."

"What makes you say that?" Wallace asked, his chest tight.

"Don't tell anyone I ever said this," Neo warned as he pointed to the picture on his screen. "But they say you can tell what a man loves if you find what he looks at when he smiles."

Wallace's eyes fell back to the picture and landed on the ear-to-ear, all teeth smile that stretched across Andrew's face, his eyes focused on Arlette as if she was the only thing worth seeing in the world.

With the image of Andrew and Arlette seared through the pink matter of his mind, Wallace snatched up Arlette's stuff, along with elgyem, and made a quick exit from the lobby and up to his room. He passed numerous students, all looking to be heading to the tournament judging by their gear, who all regarded him with sideways glances.

Wallace dropped Arlette's crate along with elgyem and spinarak's Poké Ball on his bed before he left for a quick shower.

The bathroom smelled of bleach and steam, which is to say it smelled as if he'd just missed the housekeeping staff that regularly cleaned his floor. All the shower stalls were empty, but still Wallace picked the one at the far end of the hall and tugged at the curtains, looping them over nails in the rods to ensure as much privacy as possible in a public bathroom. He stripped in the small drain section outside the shower and hung his clothes in a stack on a rung before he set an armful of supplies down outside the shower. He cranked the heat up for the water, testing it a few times with his hand until he couldn't stand it anymore before he turned it higher.

Like a machine running through a process, Wallace went through his toiletries, all fresh from the delivery Ignatius dropped off, before he stood under the scalding water, his skin turning skin and his digits puckering.

He watched the water under his feet whirlpool around a drain and waited for the soapy foam of his shampoo and body wash to vanish before he shut the water off. He scrubbed at his skin with the towel, scratching away dead skin and leaving his arms red before he dressed, his body still wet, and returned to his room.

When he went back to his room Garret was there, laying flat on his bed with his mareep, Amber, walking across his chest. "W-Wallace?"

"Hm?" Wallace asked as he slipped on his shoes and pulled the box of Arlette's stuff under his arm. He held his hand out to elgyem who gingerly floated from the bed and up to his usual perch on Wallace's shoulder.

"D-Did you maybe want to get dinner?" Garret asked. "Everyone will be at the tournament, the main dining room will be quiet."

Wallace weighed the option, but the thought of food quickly made his stomach turn. Instead he grabbed up spinarak's Poké Ball and headed for the door. "I need to drop this stuff off," he said. "Maybe later."

"Oh, okay."

Wallace tried to ignore the disappointment in Garret's voice as he stepped into the hallway. Keeping a dinner date with Garret was the last thing on his mind as his stomach twisted into knots over everything Neo had laid out. Arlette didn't seem like the type to hold up under pressure and she'd probably tell the police everything, and like Neo predicted they'd check the security tapes and find him on camera.

As Wallace wandered through the ICO, navigating brightly painted hallways down to the second floor of Oak Hall, he thought back to his time in the Camphrier Pokémon Center. He couldn't recall seeing any security cameras, but if Andrew was seen on one in Lumiose, then they did exist. But could he be identified? Wallace rubbed his hand over his short brown hair, still damp, and wondered if anyone could tell him apart from his appearance on a security camera.

Wallace pulled himself from his thoughts outside room 204, the number he received from Nurse Joie as being Arlette's room. He knocked lightly on the door, half expecting no one to be inside, but after just a few seconds the wooden door swung open with a statuesque girl standing behind it.

For a moment, Wallace was awestruck and lost under the crush of stormy grey eyes that belonged to a girl who easily would have fit into his past life. Her face looked like it'd been carved from stone and chiseled by artisan hands into the features found only in those of the rich and famous. She was tall, taller than him, with golden brown skin and silver-blonde hair that was pulled back into a high bun.

She looked completely casual in a flannel that consisted of different shades of blue and cut-off jeans. But Wallace could see the cut of muscles and her broad shoulders through the fabrics and guessed she looked equally as stunning in a gown at a party his father might throw.

"Hi," she said, her voice soft, but scratchy, like his favorite song coming out an antique record player. "You must be Wallace."

Wallace nodded, unable to think of anything to say.

"Nurse Joie told me you'd be coming by with Arlette's things," the girl said as she stepped back into the room and pulled the door open completely. "I'm her roommate, Tempest Tlaloc. Would you like to come in?"

Wallace wet his lips before he stepped inside a room with the same dimensions as his own, but somehow looked much bigger and homey. The two beds sat high up in the room, propped up by wooden boards that added space under each bed. A large plush royal blue rug was spread across the center of the floor, already settled beneath the frames of the beds. The far side of the room was a mixed hue of blues and purples with a large violet beanbag chair sitting at the foot of the bed, draped in purple bedding. A desk, topped with supplies sat under the bed and a large bookcase, already filled with novels, sat adjacent to the bed. Numerous beds, in all different shapes and sizes, had been placed in a haphazard arrangement along with pillows and fleece blankets on the floor.

Wallace's eyes followed Tempest as she eased down into a chair beneath the bed by the door. A few items were scattered at her feet, and to oppose the other side of the room, Tempest's was mostly dark reds, oranges, and yellows. Wallace found himself looking past her, to her desk, where large photo frames sat.

"That's Arlette's side, you can just set her stuff down wherever," she said with a glance to the far side of the room.

He nodded as he tore his eyes away from the photos and strolled to Arlette's bed where he placed the box on top of her desk. His eyes scanned the desktop, but found no photos of Andrew. He lingered there for a breath, buying time, thinking of an excuse to meddle, before he heard something wet smacked against glass above him.

Wallace jerked up quickly and smacked the back of his head against the bottom of Arlette's bed. "Ow!" he yelped as he recoiled back and looked to the wall before him. Like his room, the wall opposite the door held three rectangular windows with three beige blinds. But unlike his room, the windows on Arlette's side were covered by the blinds that had been pulled down to cover them completely. "What was that?" he asked, looking back to Tempest while he massaged the throbbing knot on the back of his head.

Tempest bit her lip and regarded him with uneasy eyes that never reached his eyes. "It's nothing."

Wallace narrowed his gaze at her before he rounded Arlette's bed and stopped at the window in time to hear something else splat against the glass outside. Slightly afraid of what he might find behind the blinds, Wallace grabbed the fabric and gave a solid tug.

"Wallace, please –"

He glanced back to Tempest before he released the blind and sent it rolling back to the top. Glaring sunlight pushed through the glass that was smeared and crusted with yellow goop that looked like egg yolks. Something soared up from below and smacked dead center into the window, joining the rest of the mess that dripped and congealed to the glass. But what held Wallace's attention were three words that had been painted onto the glass in vibrant red paint that had dried in dripping strokes: **TRUST NO ONE.**

Disregarding the paint that he couldn't help think was blood, the letters themselves looked angry and painted on to be read from inside the room. Smeared across the glass in wide and harsh strokes, surrounded by stray splatters, the entire length of the three windows were marred by the message.

He'd been so caught up in the words, Wallace failed to hear Tempest cross the room. She grabbed the ends of each blind and pulled them down quickly to cover the goop and the blood red message.

"They've been at it all morning," Tempest said as she crossed back onto her side leaned against her bed post. "That and slipping notes under the door for Arlette, each worse than the last. I don't know how she's going to handle it when she comes back. I don't think she had anything to do with that boy's disappearance, but that doesn't seem to matter." Tempest pressed her chin to her shoulder as she looked to the door, as if expecting a note to come shooting into the room.

"Did you know him, Andrew?" Wallace asked, his voice tight.

Tempest softly shook her head before she crossed her arms over her chest. "But Arlette is always writing in her journals, I'm sure there must be pages dedicated to him."

Wallace craned his neck to the side as he took in the sight of Arlette's bookcase, filled to the brim with different titles, but not every book on the shelves had titles marked along their spines. As he strained to pick out any that stood out to him, Tempest moved to the door and slowly opened it.

"Thank you for bringing her stuff back, but I'm heading out soon," she said. "My family is coming and I promised to take them to the tournament."

Wallace glanced over to see Tempest standing patiently by the door, his invitation to leave. "No problem," he said as he tore himself away from the thought of digging through Arlette's bookcase in hopes of finding anything written about Andrew.

After taking his leave, Wallace slowly wandered down the halls, heading back towards the center of the ICO, when he passed a wide bulletin board before one of the staircases. Different flyers for clubs and events were pinned to the board, as well as an advertisement for the tournament, but all were overshadowed by the horde of papers, typed on with the same angry words he found on Arlette's window: **TRUST NO ONE**.

Wallace moved closer to the board, his eyes scanning the halls for the return of whoever posted them before he began tearing them down. As he tore down the first layer of pages, he found more underneath, hot from a recent print, before he ripped them down as well and found a missing persons poster. In the center was the most recent official picture of Andrew after his last Pokémon League victory.

With Andrew's bright and hopeful eyes staring back at him, and the anonymous warning gripped tightly in his fists, Wallace tore off from his spot in front of the bulletin board and darted up the stairs, back to Calone Hall.

Back in his room, Wallace found Garret and Amber were gone. Hoping to leave before either returned, Wallace dove for his closest and pulled out of his duffel. Stowed away deep inside he found the folders he brought with him to complete his new identity. With eyes on the door, Wallace dug around inside the folders before he pulled out a small business card printed with Izumi's name and number.

Wallace hastily tossed the bag back into the closest and rushed from the room and down to the lobby, so fast he felt elgyem clutching onto his shoulder for dear life. The lobby was quiet, Neo and the playing cards were gone, and not even the attendant was in sight, his place behind the circulation desk vacant, so Wallace wasted no time in dialing in Izumi's number. He bounced uneasily from foot to foot, occasionally watching the courtyard outside to see anyone approaching the front door, before the call picked up after several rings.

"Yo, HM01, also known as The Cut, Lumiose City's one stop shop for all your hair colors and chops. What can we do for you?"

Bewildered, Wallace pulled the phone from his ear and glanced at the business card. "Hello?" he asked at the base of the phone.

"Yeah? What can we do for you?" a male asked through the line.

"I'm looking for Izumi, is this the right number?" Wallace asked

"Who is this?"

"Wallace, I was at the Forgery a few days ago, is this Sid?" Wallace asked, narrowing his eyes as he picked up on the tone coming through the line.

"Oh, Wallace, it's you, yeah it's me," Sid said. "Yo, boss has been waiting to hear from you. Hang on!"

Wallace let out a sigh of relief as he listened to faint rustling sounds as the phone seemed to be changing hands before a familiar cheery voice greeted him through the line.

"Wally! It's been too long!" Izumi shouted. "Where are you, how have you been?"

"Fine, and you?" Wallace said, choosing the question he felt most comfortable answering. "I'm on my way to a tournament," he said, which was really neither here nor there, but seeing another poster for the tournament resting on the counter beside him seemed to root that plan in his mind.

"As wonderful as I believe I am to talk to, I know you called for more than just to hear my voice," Izumi said. "So, what can your friendly neighborhood Forger do for you?"

"Security camera footage that I'm on, the police are going to see it and that can't happen," Wallace said, stressing every word.

"If I may ask, what is it exactly that you're doing on this footage that you don't want the police to see?" Izumi asked.

"Nothing," Wallace sighed. "But me on the camera, it's related to why I had to leave Lumiose." Wallace looked to elgyem who regarded him with wide and questioning eyes.

"Well, if you don't want to give me the juicy details I suppose I can understand, but I can't help," Izumi said.

"Nothing I tell you will change anything, just –"

"Oh no, Wally, you misunderstand," Izumi said before he cleared his throat. "You keeping things from me isn't the issue. On our last encounter you told me you didn't need my help anymore, even refused my security package for additional services. As far as I'm concerned our business together is over."

Wallace bit into his lower lip and gripped the edge of the counter until his knuckles faded to white. "This isn't the time for you to act wounded!" Wallace hissed, wanting to raise his voice, but also needing to keep quiet in case someone walked through the lobby. "I really need your help."

"I can hear it in your voice, but you said it yourself –"

"$5,000," Wallace blurted out. "That was the price for your security package right?"

"Ah, that offer has expired," Izumi said. "Kind of a follow-up deal with the identity package. Besides, what you're asking goes behind what the security package outlines." "

"Then what is the price for you to do what I'm asking?" Wallace asked, squeezing his eyes shut.

"What are you asking for, exactly?" Izumi asked.

Wallace let out a long sigh and placed his free hand flat on the counter before he began to prod at the countertop. "The police, soon or later, are going to look at the security camera footage in the Camphrier Pokémon Center hoping to find something on it, something that will help them in a case. But what they are going to find on the camera footage, is me, and that can't happen," he said, stressing the end again.

"And why is that?"

"Because it'll lead them to me, looking for answers to solve their case," Wallace said. "Answers I can't give them. Not because I wouldn't want to, but because – I – I just can't talk to the police."

"So you're asking me to swap your footage on the security camera out for someone else's?" Izumi asked.

"Yes."

"Mm, that's a very expensive process."

Wallace rolled his eyes before he pinched at the bridge of his nose. "How much?"

"$20,000," Izumi said without missing a beat.

"Fine, just do it, please!"

"As you wish, Wally, I'll get to work immediately. I'll be sending Sid to collect my payment."

Wallace's brows furrowed as he hovered over the phone base. "Sid? Why would he know where I am? I never told you where I was going."

"You didn't have to," Izumi said before Wallace heard the phone click in his hear, followed by a dial tone.

Wallace kept the phone pressed to his ear before he slowly let it drop to the counter before hanging it up. He propped his elbows up on the counter and rested his head in the cradle of his fingers. When he reopened his eyes, Wallace found himself staring at the tournament poster again.

* * *

After leaving the ICO lobby, Wallace returned to his room, but found it empty still and considered stopping by Neo's room before he remembered he had no clue what his room number was. So, with just elgyem resting on his shoulder and spinarak's Poké Ball in his pocket, Wallace made his way from the ICO and across the turnaround lot before heading towards the Origin Center.

Along with a throng of students, Wallace entered into a long rectangular building that held classrooms, an indoor track, a fitness room, and sat attached to the Styrax Stadium, where Wallace found himself in the middle of the tournament fanfare.

With it being the final day of summer before classes began, all students had finally arrived on campus, and Wallace found himself nervously rolling spinarak's Poké Ball around in the palm of his hand as he moved to avoid hordes of older students who lumbered by with pokémon much taller than themselves.

On a whim, Wallace released spinarak onto the top bar of the metal railing that bordered the stone balcony above the field. The small green pokémon emerged and scurried across the railing before it leapt onto Wallace's sweatshirt and quickly scaled the front before he attached himself to the drawstrings and hung across Wallace's chest like a necklace.

Making gentle strokes down the spinarak's back, Wallace looked out over the field of Styrax Stadium. The university's stadium was surprisingly large and as Wallace faced it he noticed large stone levees erected beyond the stadium that the bay water sloshed up against. White lines had been painted across the turf field, condensing the massive lawn into a smaller regulation battle arena where trainers were already in the middle of a match. Wallace glanced to his shoulder where elgyem sat, glancing around the open space, wide eyed.

Turning, Wallace saw the metal bleachers that rose in tiers to the highest row where students with the most school spirit, wearing university merchandise and waving homemade signs in the air, were cheering for the trainers on the field.

Pokémon darted down the metal steps between the columns of seats, all different types Wallace had never seen before. One, with yellow and white spikes protruding from its body zipped down the bleachers on all fours at lightning fast speed and with a quick yap it zipped past Wallace. A large pokémon with wings and feather patterns like flames flapped far overhead, soaring in circles over the stands.

After just a little while standing on the balcony, a large crowd emerged from the double doors that led down into the lobby and Wallace scooted away from the railing to avoid the crowd. Moving down the side of the bleachers Wallace found himself moving past the series of metal bars that supported the bleachers. Through the gaps in the bars, Wallace caught glimpses of a body dancing wildly there in the shadows.

A bob cut of matte black hair swung through the air as a girl danced in the center of a gap between two diagonal beams. Her skin, the color of toffee candy, glinted bronze with sweat under the bars of stadium lights that shattered through the stands. Wallace watched as she swayed on the tips of her toes, making grand arm and hand gestures as she moved. Wallace focused on a glint of light and two neon blue lines that ran from her hand and up to her ears. As he inched closer, ducking and stepping over beams, he made out the sight of a small device in her hand that the neon blue ear buds connected her to.

The girl began to sway and slowly turn as her bare feet scraped across the concrete, a strand of her hair was locked between her lips as she nibbled at it, her eyes locked onto a large book in her free hand. She continued to swirl and sway across the surprisingly clean concrete before she looked up and caught sight of her audience at the edge of the bleachers. The girl's natural poise and grace vanished in a second as she spun and hit her foot against the large metal rail.

"Ahh!" she cried as she dropped the book. The tome fell into a spread on the across a beam and the girl collapsed onto the ground, gripping her foot as if the entire extremity were in danger of coming off.

"Are you okay?" Wallace called out as he crept closer, but the girl didn't seem to notice him.

The girl's face scrunched in confusion as she looked back up to Wallace before she quickly dug her fingers into her ear. She popped the earbuds out and tangled the wires up around her hands, a singer's voice still audible from a distance.

"What?" she asked.

Wallace frowned as he ducked below beams, moving closer to the fallen girl. "I asked if you were okay."

"I'm fine," she said as she off-handedly waved back to Wallace before she glanced to her fallen book, slumped and spread on a diagonal beam.

Feeling suddenly uncomfortable and invasive, Wallace glanced around the space for something to say. "I liked your dance."

The girl scrunched up her face and took in a breath so deep Wallace heard it from yards away before she sprung up from the ground as if she hadn't just hurt her foot. She stormed, hobbling, towards Wallace with a threatening finger aimed at him "If you tell anyone about that I swear I'll – "

The girl cut off as speakers located around the stadium cracked to life with a loud and boisterous voice. "Yo, yo, yo! Radix it's good to be back! If ya don't know, let me boost the quality of ya life by letting ya know who I am. Nasturtium Freelily, senior, head of the class, and your official master of ceremonies for the back to school tournament!"

The loud voice faded into a hiss before a thunderous stomping boomed down from the bleachers as the crowd above Wallace and the girl started a cheer, chanting out the name Nat.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah!" the man on the intercom shouted again. "You know who I am. Our last upperclassman match just wrapped up and now it's time to get to the fresh meat with a mixed match-up. We'll be pulling names of our registered participants to square off. The first match up for the mixed match-up is..."

Wallace shrugged into his sweatshirt as he turned on the heels of his feet and faced the way he came, seeing a few others students slinking out of the shadows and heading towards the stadium. The rusting of paper could be heard over the intercom amongst mild cuss words and snickering.

"First up we have Persia Swift against Belladonna Freelily," the man on the intercom said, his voice growing louder as he enunciated every syllable of the last participants' name. "That's right, my little brother, bellossom as I like to call him, is up for his first ever back to school tournament battle. He dropped out last year claiming a stomach virus kept him from battling, but not this time. Bella, get out there!"

The sound of knuckles cracking brought Wallace's attention to the girl who had squatted and was in the middle of stretching out her legs. "Go time!"

"What?" Wallace asked as the girl started hopping up and down. "What's happening?"

"I'm up," she said before she jabbed herself in the chest with her thumb and winced. "Persia Swift, Percy, that's me. I hope this kid Bella has the run away ability, cause he's gonna need it when I hit the arena."

Wallace in silence as Persia hopped over the beams, scooping her book up in the process, as she headed out towards the balcony.

"You're rooting for me, right?" she asked with a quick glance over her shoulder.

"Uh, we just met," Wallace said before he looked to elgyem, who seemed to be just as confused by Persia.

Persia shrugged again before she brushed her hand along the side of her head, casting aside locks of her head and exposing a rainbow colored gem that hung from her ear as part of an earring. "Just thought you might want to root for a sure thing."

A glint of light off the curious looking stone on Persia's ear captured Wallace's attention and despite having no interest in witnessing the match, he found himself trailing behind her as she made her way back to the balcony. He stopped at the railing while energetic girl followed a stone stairway down from the balcony and onto a black asphalt track that looped the stadium.

Wallace glanced around the field and watched as trainers from the previous match were trotting to the sidelines, but a few yards down from him he found Don, the boy Neo discovered in the abandoned mansion, sulking across the field, his roserade leading the way.

As the two trainers focused into the center of the field men and women with boom-sticks and cameras zeroed in on them, their closeups appearing on the scoreboard.

"How about a double?" Persia asked as she tossed a Poké Ball between her hands. "Two on two, first to have both faint is the loser, pretty simple."

Following Persia's challenge, the cameras focused on Don, whose face was red as the lid of Persia's Poké Ball. He glanced nervously between Persia and the camera before he nodded in agreement. "O-Okay, Atropa you're up. You too, Amaryllis." Don reached to his waistline and fumbled for a second with the line of tools there before a Poké Ball popped off and rolled across the turf before it split and a flare of light filled the scoreboard screen.

What emerged was far too familiar to Wallace. With leathery green skin and a body composed of bulging muscles, Don's meganium stomped its large forefeet on the field beside Atropa the roserade.

Wallace felt his heartbeat thundering so loud in his chest he felt the vibrations through the veins in his eyes. Amaryllis shook its head and the vibrant pink and white petals around its neck followed, but with each movement it made, Wallace could see arcanine's massive fangs chomping down around the green flesh. The crowd had begun stomping again, but Wallace only heard the crunch of bones in every footfall.

From the corner of his eye Wallace saw a sudden and spastic movement further down the railing. Turning slowly he found Eleanor standing on the balcony, hands clenched tightly around the black bar railing. His quivering eyes danced from her hands to her face where a long white bandage was taped to her cheek. Behind the bandage he wondered what the knife wound Chara had left on her looked like, a thought he quickly shoved aside as Eleanor turned to face him.

His presence, a mere few yards from her, seemed to give her pause and she tripped over her feet and crashed into a few students as she tried to back away. Eleanor looked between Wallace and the nearest exit of the balcony before she tore off and vanished into the shadows that led back behind the bleachers.

"Alright, decided by one of our challengers, we've got a double battle going on. Talonflame and klekfi versus meganium and roserade," the man on the intercom, Nat, announced, snapping Wallace's attention back to the field.

The large bird with feathers and patterns like flames that he'd seen soaring above the stands had joined Persia on the field beside a small metallic pokémon with keys hanging from its body. Don's choices stood beside him at the ready before a loud blaring whistle went off in the stadium.

* * *

End of Chapter Ten

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ A few debuts this chapter. **Tempest Tlaloc** by **snowwolf12132** , **Persia Swift** by **OlyinFlight,** and **Nasturtium Freelily** by **ShinyEeveeee.**

 **Question of the Chapter #9:** Do you think Izumi will help Wallace again, or will things become more complicated as a result of his interference?


	11. About A Boy

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Eleven – About a Boy**

 _Where does one go from a world of insanity?  
_ _Somewhere on the other side of despair_ _._ _\- T.S. Elio_ _t_

* * *

The whistle that signaled the start of the battle might as well have triggered a bomb.

From his spot on the balcony, overlooking the stadium floor, Wallace heard the bleachers behind him explode with commotion. As he glanced over his shoulder, Wallace saw the tiers of students become one giant shrieking mass of bodies. Many were out of their seats, shouting towards the field, pumping their arms and signs in the air. Wallace passed along a curious look to elgyem, who seemed to be just as surprised by the behavior, before he turned forward in time to catch the fury of motion on the field.

One of the cameras was focused on Persia, her bronze skin glowing under the stadium lights, and Wallace could sense her excitement, palpable through the scoreboard screen. Even with the sounds on the stadium floor amplified, Persia's utterance was lost under the roar of the crowd, but her talonflame gave one mighty flap of its wings and took off. The pokémon, a screeching mass of red, black, and brown feathers soared into the sky above the stadium, vanishing between stadium lights as it made tight loops overhead.

The camera operators seemed to give up on following talonflame and returned to Persia whose klefki wavered in the air near her. "Lock, set up crafty shield," Persia said.

Wallace watched as the small metallic pokémon became the focus of the cameras and the keys that dangled from its body glimmered. Soon the camera panned as polygons, translucent pink and each with eight sides, formed on the field out of thin air. Each of them stretched into elongated forms and appeared simultaneously with no discernible pattern to their arrival.

Despite the cameras tracking the movements of the polygons as they honed in on klefki, Wallace found his eyes drawn to Don who reigned his pokémon in close to him.

"Spark, use tailwind and follow-up with flame charge!" Persia's voice echoed around the stadium before the piercing cry of her talonflame responded to it.

Wallace looked up from Don just in time to see Persia's talonflame making its way back around to his side of the stadium. Behind it, Wallace could see ripples in the air under the stadium lights. As the bird looped around to pass him, Wallace pressed gently against spinarak, who still rested against his chest, and used his other hand to secure elgyem's spot on his shoulder as talonflame flapped past balcony at an alarming speed. A violent gust of wind followed the bird in its wake before talonflame took the sky with another great flap of its wings.

The camera operators on the field angled their lens up to the sky as a spark of fire ignited around talonflame, visible like a flare of light against the night sky, before it came sweeping back down. The small embers gathered along its wings soon catching across the entire pokémon, cloaking it in orange and red flames as it angled its body, heading straight for Don.

"Amaryllis, use ancient power," Don said, his voice echoing through the stadium, his uneasy face flashing across the screen.

Meganium worked its body in a pattern, shaking the lush petals around its neck before it conjured several swirling balls of light around itself. As Amaryllis raised its head to the sky the orbs around its neck solidified in large jagged rocks that were launched into the air towards the fire that had consumed talonflame.

One of the rocks whizzed past talonflame's head, a close encounter caught by the cameras, but talonflame didn't seem deterred and in a matter of seconds a trail of fire ignited across the turf as it zeroed in on its target, meganium.

The green quadruped wavered uneasily on the scoreboard screen as talonflame lunged towards the ground and popped up at the last minute, angling itself towards meganium's chest, just below the base of its neck. The collision resonated through the stadium, hollow and loud. The fire from talonflame's body faded, but not before small embers caught on meganium's petals, igniting the pink flowers with licks of red fire.

"Amaryllis, quick, use body slam!" Don called out.

Despite the spreading flames, Amaryllis leaned back and wobbled on its hind legs before it curled its front legs in and slammed down onto talonflame. The crowd gasped as talonflame was smashed under meganium's massive body, no hint of the pokémon's bright plumage visible under the grass-type's body.

"Spark, use brave bird," Persia commanded as the cameras found her face, calm and collected and with a small trace of a smile gracing her lips.

The view on the scoreboard spun as meganium became the focus again, its face registering mild confusion before a burst of blue light shattered out from underneath it. Slowly, meganium was lifted off the ground before it was hurled upwards. Talonflame emerged from underneath, spreading its wings and bending its legs before it propelled itself upwards and slammed into meganium's underbelly.

"Again!" Persia shouted.

"Taaa!" Talonflame cried as it landed and crouched, seemingly preparing to throw itself into the air again.

"Atropa," Don said, clenching his fists. "Use sludge bomb."

"Flame charge on roserade!" Persia snapped.

Talonflame whipped around and angled its wings for take off as sparks of fire ignited around itself, but before it took off the shadow of meganium fell back over the bird.

"Body slam, Amaryllis!" Don said.

The cameras captured the moment of uncertainty in talonflame's eyes as it seemed to cancel its flame charge and look to Persia who stood silently beside klefki. In the time it took Persia to utter a command, the petals on roserade's hands opened and from them came a barrage of dark gunk that pelted talonflame's breast, knocking the pokémon off balance and sending it stumbling directly under meganium's body slam.

"Spark, use tailwind, get out of there!" Persia shouted, her fists clenched tight in front of her.

"Flying-types are immune to ground-type moves, but if talonflame can't take to the sky it's just as susceptible to them like every other pokémon," Don said with a gleam in his eyes. "Amaryllis, while you've got it trapped, use earthquake."

Wallace went on high alert and gripped the metal balcony railing, remembering how the ground shook when he encountered onix in the safari. Amaryllis the meganium raised its head high, the petals at its neck signed by the dying flames, and let out a powerful cry before it stomped down on the field. In one simple movement Amaryllis' summoned a tremor in the stadium. The men and women on the field staggered and toppled, as did Persia and Don, while Don's roserade seemed to bounce around the turf, only remaining on the ground for a second to avoid the effect of meganium's attack.

The power of the earthquake didn't seem to reach the stands, something only Wallace seemed surprised by as the rest of the students didn't seem to care about meganium's attack in regard to their safety. As the rumbling quieted and the shaking of the turf died down, meganium stood up and bellowed out a cry down to talonflame that laid still on the ground.

As the camera operators got their legs back under them, they whirled around to catch the frustration on Persia's face.

"If you've got anything left in you, Spark, it's time to roost!" Persia shouted across the field.

"Amaryllis, use ancient power, please!" Don said with his hands cupped in front of his chest. "Atropa, sludge bomb again."

Talonflame managed to flip itself over onto its side, one large wing sticking up into the air at an odd pattern that Wallace couldn't help but think meant it was broken. Talonflame squawked loudly and painfully as it tried to get to its feet, a pale light haloing its body as it shook feathers loose into the air. The feathers that talonflame shed seemed to be all the ones along its body that were ruffled or bent out of place, allowing it to showcase newer feathers beneath as it struggled to hop away, unable to straighten its wing to take flight again.

Before talonflame could make it far from Amaryllis and Atropa, another barrage of sludge bombs struck the flying-type in its back and sent it careening down onto the turf. Persia's gasp was heard through the stadium as a row of large rocks, summoned by Amaryllis, smashed against talonflame's body.

"I think your klefki's shield as worn off by now, so Atropa, use grass whistle," Don said as he trotted over to Amaryllis's side. "You, use aromatherapy."

Wallace split his attention between Amaryllis as it shook the petals around its neck again, this time glimmering with a wide spectrum of colors, and Don's roserade. Atropa stalked close to the fallen talonflame and brought the petals on its hands to its mouth before it emitted a high pitched, but soothing sound that echoed through the stadium.

The scoreboard camera focused on talonflame, the pokémon's lids were fluttering closed quickly before a red beam of light struck its head. Without warning talonflame was recalled into a Poké Ball in Persia's hand and as the camera focused on her she recalled klefki too.

"Does this mean I win?" Don asked, glancing around the stadium, uncertainty in his voice.

"Ugh, he's so clueless," the announcer, Nat, said through the stadium's intercom. "The result of our first underclassman match has been decided. Belladonna Freelily is the winner!

An odd mixture of cheers and groans erupted from the stands, but a solid round of applause won out as people stood to their feet to congratulate the winner. Wallace found himself smiling and clapping along with them as the camera operators circled Don who bashfully tried to avoid looking into their lens.

"We'll take a short break before we continue with our next match-up," Nat said before static filled with the stadium.

Wallace turned his back to the stadium and leaned against the railing as he watched people leaving their seats and climbing the steps down to the balcony, all headed for the concession stand during the interval. Wallace rubbed absently at the top of spinarak's head who seemed to have fallen asleep as his eyes followed the bleachers up past the press box to the night sky that seemed completely black behind the glaring set of stadium lights.

"Pretty exciting, huh?"

Wallace turned his wandering attention from the star speckled canvas above to a voice at his side and found Neo and Garret standing there. "Where were you?" Wallace asked, to neither of them in particular. "I went looking for you before I came over." Which wasn't entirely true.

"N-Neo wanted to get good seats," Garret said, fiddling with the drawstrings of his dingy yellow hoodie, his eyes darting nervously down to the spinarak stretched across Wallace's chest. "What is that?"

Neo cocked up an eyebrow as he followed Garret's eyes. "Spinarak, you're from Johto, I know you've seen one before," he said as he booted up his tablet and angled it at Wallace's chest.

"Y-Yeah," Garret said before he started scatching at his neck, wincing at the sleeping pokémon. "But why is it hanging from your neck like that?"

Wallace shrugged gently, making an effort to remain still as Neo seemed to be taking pictures of spinarak, or cataloging it like he had the safari onix. "I let him out and that's where he went," he said as he rubbed a line down spinarak's back, the small pokémon's legs twitching in response. "You'll be happy to know I caught this one, Neo."

"But still not elgyem," Neo said as he flicked across his tablet's screen. "So, did you enjoy the battles?"

"I only saw one," Wallace said as he looked to the field.

"That's why we came early, to observe the competition," Neo said with an adjustment of his glasses before he looked to the field too.

Wallace smirked as he followed his gaze and found Don who was quickly walking off the field. "That's the guy who attacked Lampent, right?"

Neo narrowed his eyes and reached a hand up to brush through his hair, but ended up just twisting a single strand into a screw pattern. "What's your point?"

"Nothing," Wallace said with a shrug as he propped himself against the railing and looked to elgyem who seemed to be nodding off, struggling to remain upright on his shoulder. "Just that maybe you want a rematch, I'd understand if you did."

"Are you looking for a rematch with Chara?" Neo asked, his lips forming a tight smile.

Just the mention of the boy's name made the scars on Wallace's back throb and suddenly elgyem and spinarak felt like weights on his body.

"One of the students he left inside said they heard the two of you battling upstairs," Neo said before he glanced to his tablet. "I'm surprised you made it out alive, no offense, but like I've said before, classes are about to start and you've got two new and completely inexperienced pokémon on your team."

"Thanks," Wallace said dryly with a sly roll of his eyes before he turned his attention past Neo in time to see Don and Persia both come trotting up the staircase.

Garret followed Wallace's eyes and did a quick look over his shoulder before he turned to face the trainers. "G-Great battle, Don."

Don stopped short before the group, his hands behind his back, while Persia trudged on behind him, muttering to herself.

"Thank you," Don said quietly as he stepped towards the group and pulled something large out from behind his back.

Wallace didn't know what it was at first, but as he looked at the object as a whole he realized Don had revealed a large and intrigue bouquet of flowers from behind his back and was extending them to Neo. "Um, Neo, they're for –"

Neo's brows shot up as he turned around and Don practically shoved the bouquet in his face. "For me?" Neo asked, looking as if he'd just swallowed a large berry whole.

"I made it just for you, an apology, for how we met. I was hoping I'd see you here and be able to give them to you in person, leaving them outside your door wouldn't feel right. Not that's I know where you live! I mean, I just, sorry." Don's lips curled into a wider smile as he extended his arms, pushing the bouquet of flowers closer to Neo. "I just wanted to say I hope Lampent wasn't hurt badly."

"Lampent is fine, he's recovering," Neo said as he reached out for the bouquet uneasily, his eyes gliding over the array of vibrant colored petals.

Before Don could pass the bouquet off to Neo, a large hand swatted down between the two boys and knocked the bouquet out of Don's hands. The flowers and their wrapping slapped the ground before a sandaled foot stomped down and ground the bouquet into the stone.

Wallace's eyes went wide as he followed the leg up to find an older looking student hovering over Don. The parts of the upperclassman's body that weren't covered by faded yellow shorts and his white shirt were lightly tanned and muscular limbs, all with splatters of freckles dotting them. Wallace's eyes darted to a flashy gold watch fastened around the man's wrist and then to a low hanging charm necklace he looped his finger through.

His head, looking to be chiseled from stone judging by the hard planes and sharp lines of his face, was angled down to Don. His mouth, a jagged line of brilliant white teeth, grew wickedly broad as his face filled with a look of uncontrollable self-satisfaction as he dragged his sandal against the ground, scraping off the ruined flower petals.

"What're you up to, Bella?" the man asked as he brushed back a large circular straw hat on his head, a pair of sunglasses balanced across the brim. "Giving flowers to your boyfriend?" he asked as he tossed a look over his shoulder, his hard, but dazzling eyes looking over Neo and Wallace, straying a second too long on the latter.

"N-No, it's not that... I was just trying to, I – I – I –"

"I blah, blah, blah," the man roared out over Don, sounding like a broken alarm as he bent at the waist and shoved himself into Don's face. "Calm down, bellossom, ya sound like a spazz."

Wallace's brows raised in curiosity as the man's voice and manner of speech rung out like a bell in his mind. It was the man from the intercom.

"Aren't you going to introduce me?" the man asked as he wrapped a long and bulging arm around Don's neck, perhaps intentionally pulling the boy into a headlock. "Excuse my rude little brother, I'm Nat Freelily, the brains and brawn of our family. Right?" Nat asked as he drilled his knuckle against the crown of Don's head.

Wallace watched in mild horror as Don's face burned bright red as he struggled to free himself, twisting and turning his body in an attempt to squeeze out of Nat's hold.

"Good work out there, Bella," Nat said as he released Don from the headlock, but quickly flicked him in the ear instead. "I was almost proud of you."

"Th-Thanks, I guess." Don huffed and Wallace swore he heard him let out a small cry as he cupped his ear and rubbed at his neck. "Nat, this is Neo, that's Wallace," Don said as he gestured to the boys, but he stopped short at Garret. "I'm sorry, I don't remember your name."

"Huh," Nat huffed, his eyes scanning the boys up and down. "Any other forgettable freshman you want to introduce me to?"

What little joy Wallace could find on Garret's face quickly melted into disappointment as he bowed his head under Nat's intense gaze.

"I-I never said they were freshman," Don said.

"Only you would make friends with freshmen at the beginning of the school year," Nat said as he stretched out his arms and rose up on his tip toes. "You need real friends, Bella, you're going to hurt my reputation if you keep hanging with the waitlists. You're a Freelily, you need A+ friends, these three," Nat said, waving his hand weakly from Wallace to Garret. "Collectively they're like a D, minus."

"And just who are you to be talking down to us?" Neo asked. "I heard your intro on the intercom, you're supposed to be the head of the class? Which one, the special education class?"

Wallace blinked and missed it. Nat closed the distance between him and Neo and had the younger boy's shirt in his fist, their faces inches apart, a dangerous gleam in Nat's eyes. "You wanna take this onto the field? I'd be happy to show a freshman his place in the food chain."

"You two make a cute couple, just be sure you don't go to bed angry. Well, don't go to _sleep_ angry."

Wallace craned his neck around to locate the source of an airy and haughty voice and found a posse of what looked like models walking back from the concession stand.

At the front of the group was a beautiful girl with impossibly long legs, exposed, despite the slight chill in the air. A pair of ice blue eyes sat hooded on a heart-shaped face, sun kissed, and framed by loose waves of hair black as pitch. She wore tattered jean shorts, flat shoes, and a long sleeved white shirt with colored sleeves that showed off a vibrant pink bra beneath her top.

Each of the three girls behind her seemed to be imperfect clone of the leader, each less stunning or remarkable than the girl at the front. The group slowed to a stop beside Nat and the girl dragged her hand down his arm, slowly pulling him away from Neo.

"Lower the testosterone boys, you're making a scene," she said. "Nat, picking fights with freshman? Not your best quality," she said with a wink before she and her followers had vanished into the crowd of people heading back to their seats.

"Who was that?" Wallace asked, the words coming out before he even thought about them.

"The only girl at the school worth paying attention to," Nat said as he turned and watched the group heading up the steps. "Serena Saint-Mars, head of the junior class. Her father is the head of the Saint-Mars financial group that handles university grants and funding."

"They're one of the most affluent families in Unova," Neo said. "I can't believe we have someone so influential at the university."

"Yeah, because we need more entitled trainers who buy their way into the school," a boy coming up the stairs said.

Wallace didn't have to turn to the stairs to see who was joining them on the balcony, as the voice was one he'd become too familiar with. Kolton, one of the university guides, and the boy Wallace spoke with one the phone in Camphrier, climbed the steps and walked out onto the balcony, stopping short of the group.

Kolton's eyes were dark and he looked somewhat bored to be there as he glanced around the gathered students, dressed in light brown pants and a maroon sweater with the collar of a white dress shirt folded over the neckline.

Wallace made it a point to avoid his gaze, because despite being technically anonymous at the university, he couldn't help but feel Kolton's words were aimed at him directly.

"Oh, hey Kol," Don said before he turned to the boys. "This is my roommate, Kol, or Kolton I guess. Did you see my battle?"

Kolton nodded and regarded Don with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "You did great. I thought I'd come and see if you wanted to head back now, we need to be up early for Stats with Professor Till."

"Statistics with Professor Till?" Neo's face perked up at that. "UC 210? I'm in that class too. That'll be fun."

"We have that class too, Wallace," Garret said.

"Oh," Wallace said. He hadn't taken a look at his schedule since it was printed the other day.

"We might have the same class, but Don and I are a part of a special lab assembled by Professor Till." Kolton cast an uneasy glance towards the freshman boys.

"Well, I'm officially bored with this conversation," Nat said as he dug a finger into his ear. "I'm heading back into the box, this tournament isn't going to run itself. Later loser," he said as he pinched Don's nose and tugged at it before he sauntered off laughing.

"Wallace, do you think you'll enter the tournament if your name is called?" Don asked, sounding nasally as he rubbed his nose.

"No," Wallace said with a hearty laugh. "As Neo likes to point out, my pokémon are inexperienced. No point in getting out there and embarrassing myself. Honestly, I don't know how I'm going to do in my classes, I don't know the first thing about raising pokémon." Wallace watched as everyone's eyes focused on him as the truth came bubbling out, surprising even himself.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kolton asked quietly, his head turned down as he nudged the wrapper of Don's ruined bouquet.

"What?" Wallace asked.

"What?" Kolton tipped his head back and raked a hand through his thick red hair and sighed before he rolled his neck around to Wallace. "You know what. You said you didn't know anything about raising pokémon. Who says stuff like that?" Kolton asked with narrowed eyes at Wallace, his face scrunching into a grimace.

"It's true," Wallace said defensively.

"This school, it doesn't just let anyone in, especially when they shrug off registration until the last minute. Yeah, I know who you are. I remember you calling the office a week before school started wanting to register," Kolton said as he glanced to Don and then Neo. "Your name was on my list of incoming students for my first day tour. I remembered it, and I was surprised you actually got in after that call. I couldn't figure out why they made an exception for you, but I thought it had to be because you're some kind of pokémon prodigy. There's no point in playing the modest role, this isn't the place. Unless that's an act to get your friends to lower their guard," Kolton said, but despite his aggressive choice of words, he showed no physical signs of it. Kolton stuffed his hands into his pockets and seemed to shirk inwards, his eyes often straying from Wallace's face.

"It's not an act," Wallace, the defensive tone in his voice dropping in place of anger as he stepped forward to Kolton. "I've never raised a pokémon before."

Kolton slipped his hands out of his pockets, a miniaturized Poké Ball visible in his fist before he folded his arms folded across his stomach. "So what is it then?" he asked as he matched Wallace's move forward until the boys were just feet from each other. "Why did they let you in here if you're not a trainer?"

"Why do you care?" Neo asked, butting into the conversation.

Kolton cast Neo a quick glance before he focused his dark eyes back on Wallace. "I had a friend who was supposed to be coming here, but they rejected his application. They told him his skills weren't up to the caliber they expected of potential students, that and he couldn't afford tuition." Kolton's eyes narrowed on Wallace and his head craned to the side as his lips curled into a smirk. "Is that it, you're rich? You waved a check or promised the school a new building and they let you walk right in?"

"Does it matter?" Wallace asked, his voice hard, but his heart fluttering.

"It does, because you don't belong here," Kolton said calmly.

"Well, I am here and I'm sorry your friend isn't, but that has nothing to do with me. Your problems with me aren't my problems, they're yours," Wallace said over his shoulder as he turned away.

Wallace barely got two unsteady steps in before a hand gripped his shoulder and spun him back around, nearly causing elgyem to fly off his shoulder and with enough force to jostle spinarak. "What's wrong with you?" Wallace asked, his hands instantly going to comfort his pokémon. Spinarak released his hold on the strings of Wallace's sweatshirt and scurried up to Wallace's free shoulder, snapping his mandibles wildly at everyone surrounding Wallace.

Garret moved in close to Wallace, but veered back once spinarak turned his attention to him. "W-Wallace, let's just go," Garret mumbled before he looked to Kolton, who seemed to be fuming mad, the redhead's hand uncurling and rolling the Poké Ball around on his palm.

"What were you, a wait list?" Neo asked, slipping in between Wallace and Kolton. "Applied, but wasn't good enough to get an automatic acceptance letter, so they waitlisted you to see if a spot would open up and that's how you got here? Why else would you be so hostile towards him?" Neo asked. "Or maybe you're poor and you work for the university to pay your tuition. Wallace doesn't have to work to go to school here, in fact he dropped some major cash to pay for his books, all at once. Not something you can do, can you?"

"Neo, stop, please," Wallace said urgently.

"Shut up!" Kolton said, his chest rising and falling with the intake of heavy breaths. His finger snapped down onto the Poké Ball that enlarged in his hand behind his trembling fingers.

"Kol, let's go," Don said cheerfully as he came to Kolton's side and gently ushered him to the stairs, placing one hand over Kolton's Poké Ball to keep him from releasing whatever waited inside. "Sorry," he said to Wallace's crew. "Neo, I'll make you another bouquet, I promise!"

Kolton didn't resist Don moving him towards the stairs, but he never took his eyes off Wallace until he was out of sight. Only then did Wallace feel the weight squeezing his chest release and he took in his first full breath.

"Maybe we should go too," Garret said, glancing nervously around them.

Wallace turned and noticed for the first time that several people standing on the balcony had their eyes fixed on him. Just the dozen of students watching him made Wallace's skin crawl with the memories of that same fear of being exposed in Lumiose when he first returned. "Yeah, it's getting late," he said and made a beeline past the concessions stand to another set of steps that led him to the lower level.

The activity outside the stadium was just as high as inside, students and visitors to the university were standing around on the grounds outside Origin Stadium and the three boys passed many groups of fans as they crossed a walkway towards a lot filled with small company vehicles. Wallace pulled spinarak from his shoulder and let the pokémon crawl up and down his arms, occasionally scratching at his underbelly to keep his hands from shaking with nerves.

Away from the spotlights of the stadium, Wallace could see the night sky, a mild violet, but darkening with the onset of a storm. A sweeping drape of thick black clouds were rolling in from the eastern side of campus and Wallace could see the moisture in the air as he stepped up onto the stone path that looped around the ICO. As they passed a large brick sign at the corner of the ICO that read RADIX UNIVERSITY, Neo spoke up. "I wish we hadn't left so soon, I had planned on getting dinner from the concessions stand," he said as he checked his tablet.

"I think café is still serving," Garret said over his shoulder before he stopped walking.

"Want to join me?" Neo asked.

"No thank you," Garret said before he looked to Wallace. "I mean, unless Wallace wants to."

Wallace paused and considered the idea, but only shook his head and grimaced, despite not having eaten all day his stomach felt like it might burst regardless. "I'm tired," he said.

"Alright," Neo said with a shrug. "I'll bring you back something for you two to try," he said with a proud grin before he spun around and backtracked around the building.

Garret watched until Neo was out of sight, taking the long way around the building to reach the student union, before he turned back to Wallace. "D-Do you mind if I ask you something?" he said as they resumed their walk, entering the courtyard outside the ICO.

"Go ahead," Wallace said, already dreading whatever Garret felt inclined to ask him.

"I can't stop thinking about what Kolton said," Garret muttered. "You're rooming with me, so I guess, I guess I just figured you had to be trainer. But if you've never raised a pokémon before, how is that possible? I mean, maybe you applied and changed majors, but to be a breeder or coordinator, you'd still have to have a team or at least experience. Which would leave research, but you didn't know how long it would take for elgyem to hatch. So is it true, are you only here because you have money? I mean, you have money, all that stuff you bought at the bookstore, but is that the only reason? I know it's none of my business, but was Kolton right?"

Wallace squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in lungfuls of the chilling air before he turned and peered at Garret.

"I-I'm sorry, I just, I don't know," Garret said. "I didn't think I'd come to school and make many, or any friends, and we've -"

"We've only known each other a few days, Garret, it takes longer than that to make a friend," Wallace said before he turned back, heading to the ICO steps.

"I know," Garret said before he trailed after Wallace. "But I-I feel like we could be friends, if you wanted. I just don't know anything about you, and thanks to Neo you already know so much about me. It's none of my business, I just was wondering, I mean we're kind of same, not much experience, but –"

"You're right," Wallace cut-in as he climbed the first step up to the ICO and turned to look down at Garret. "It is none of your business, so stop asking." Wallace regretted the words the instant he said as he watched each one strike Garret and make him shrink further down into his hoodie. Like with Nat, Wallace saw something fade away in Garret's face, a glimmer of hope that he had just blasted away with his dismissal.

Unable to find it within himself to apologize, Wallace simply turned to swipe his ID on the card reader, but before he could the door swung open and the AD John stood on the other side.

"Ah, I should have known you'd be at the tournament," John said, looking flustered. "I've been looking for you, you have a visitor, Wallace."

John held the door open for the boys and Wallace glanced over his shoulder to Garret before he stepped into the ICO, mind racing with the possibilities of who would be here to see him. The choices were slim, Public Safety, Sid, or Izumi, all of which made his chest tighten.

Wallace cautiously rounded the corner into the lobby, eyes peeled as an older woman came into view sitting crossed legged on the couch. She wore a one piece maroon dress and sat rocking back and forth, rubbing the palm of her hand against her kneecap. The woman's aged and weathered face tilted up and a smile slowly spread across her face at the sight of Wallace.

"It's been a while, do you remember me, Wally?"

Wallace swallowed down a solid lump in his throat before he slowly turned to John and Garret, both of whom were looking back at him expectantly. "Thanks, John," he said, his voice trembling. "Could I uh –" he paused and looked back between the woman and John, unable to find the right words to say.

John placed his hands on his hips before he looked to Garret and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. "Let's leave Wallace to talk," John said as he led Garret out of the lobby and through the main doors that led into the dorm halls.

Wallace listened to the sound of their retreating footsteps along with the sound of his heart thumping so hard it felt like it might burst through his chest. Once he was sure Garret and John were out of earshot and no one was going to enter the lobby, Wallace turned back to the woman who had stood up, reaching a height just a few inches taller than Wallace. Her hair was copper colored and fell down in a neat bob past her chin.

She moved slowly through the gathering of chairs, teetering on high heels, before he reached out and wrapped Wallace in a tight hug and worked her hand up and down his back. "I missed you," she said.

"Yeah," he said, feeling ashamed he had nothing better to say. A million possibilities and questions were raging through his mind at the moment of their hug, but none rooted place in his mind as he was transported back to his childhood by the familiar smell of her perfume. The ache in his chest and the buzzing in his mind subsided for an instant as Wallace let himself be taken back to a scene filled with tinsel, holiday lights, and a glittery angel, to a dim kitchen blooming with the smell of spices, sugar, and the woman before him humming.

By the time she released him and taken her seat on the edge of the couch, gesturing for him to take a seat beside her, Wallace had snapped back to the present and his mind, clear of the nostalgia, had come up with a million ways the reunion could go wrong. Spinarak and elgyem were both making noises on his shoulders, communicating with each other before Wallace moved to take a seat.

"There's no need to sugar coat this, you probably know why I'm here," she said as she watched Wallace place himself uneasily into the chair adjacent to her. Her eyes didn't say on his face for long before they fell to her hands as she rubbed the knuckles of his palms together, a nervous habit Wallace remembered.

"Andrew," Wallace said, the name was bitter on his tongue and even saying it aloud felt like an omission of guilt.

The woman nodded and clasped her hands together, cupping them over her knee. "This whole disappearance," she said, with heavy emphasis, as if the word was foreign to her. "It's sending me in a tailspin. My ex-husband was of no help to me, but luckily the Lumiose authorities were. They showed me some of his effects, mail sent from this university, things about acceptance and tuition. I tried to ask around, but you know I'm not too welcome in my old circles anymore," she said with an air of playful sadness. "But your father did help me. He said you had vanished too, into thin air. I figured the two of you must have planned something. But when I arrived the university said Andrew never showed up and they had no record of you either, but I think they must have incorrect information, you were the only Wallace in their roster, but they must have your last name wrong in their records."

"You talked to my father," Wallace said, heat rushing to his head with every word she said. "Did you tell him anything?"

The woman shrugged and held her hands out in surrender. "I have nothing to tell," she said, her voice high and tight as she shifted positions and leaned back on the couch, her legs crossing again.

"Ms. Gates, I –"

"Ah, ah, ah," she said, wagging her finger at him. "Call me Carrie. Besides, I'm the one looking for answers here, Wallace," she said followed by a laugh. "And one of my biggest questions is, why are you here?" Carrie asked as she leaned forward, propping her elbow on her knee. "I can see you've got yourself a few pokémon, they're cute. But after years of learning under your father, what could you possibly hope to gain from attending a university?"

"Lots of things," Wallace said as he took to studying posters on the walls as he reached up and rubbed elgyem's arm and then the top of spinarak's head.

"Wallace," Carrie said, her voice hard. "Don't bullshit a bullshitter. When you were little, after the incident at the river, I thought we agreed, you, me, and Andrew, that we would never lie to each other again."

Wallace kept his head facing the opposite wall, but slowly turned his eyes back to Carrie who's light demeanor had changed into something darker and more serious. "We did," Wallace said, "so why don't you tell me what you already know?"

Carrie batted her eyes before she leaned back again and traced her cheekbone with her thumbnail. "Like what?" she smiled.

"If you're here then you have to know about the case," Wallace said quietly, averting his eyes again.

"Yes," she said, following Wallace's gaze to the carpeted floor. "Under normal circumstances, a missing person's case would have been called off by now, but the officials in charge of finding Andrew have found new evidence, so they're keeping the case open, on Charles' dime."

"What new evidence?" Wallace asked, his head snapping up to meet her eyes.

"They've been monitoring the records for Andrew's trainer account and they found a record of him checking into a PC in Camphrier Town a few days after he was supposed to have disappeared. They say it could have been anyone, if Andrew had been kidnapped they could have taken his card and used it to withdraw items and money, but because it was an improper log in using his ID number, not his card, they think it could only be Andrew, which puts him in Camphrier after his disappearance. I talked to the lead detective on the case, who spoke recently with a girl Andrew dated, she said they were supposed to meet in Camphrier shortly after his birthday, which, combined with the records on his account, make it all the more likely that Andrew was in town that day," Carrie said.

"Do they know if there's been any new activity on his account?" Wallace asked.

"They haven't looked yet, they've just been focusing on establishing a trail up to and directly after his disappearance," she said. "That's also why I came. The officers told me they aren't permitted to search the university's logs, for the sake of keeping the student's activities private. They can request specific information from the school, but that could take weeks of paperwork, so I thought I'd come and see if you'd heard from him."

Wallace nodded and with a weak smile continued. "Carrie, I don't know anything."

"Listen to me," Carrie said, her voice gaining a grave tone as she closed the distance between them again. "Andrew's father is spending a fortune funding this investigation by himself, which I am all for, Charles can spend his entire life savings on this thing. Seeing him broke and desolate will bring me nothing but joy, but if you and Andrew are playing some kind of game, it needs to stop."

"This isn't a game," Wallace said, forcing himself to hold eye contact with her. "Trust me. Andrew never told me about going to school, but I found the same stuff you did, mail and letters, so I came here to, thinking this was going to be a fresh start for us, but he's not here, ask anyone. Andrew and I didn't plan this and I'm just as upset that he can't be found. I keep expecting him to show up here."

Carrie's eyes narrowed and her lips twitched before a wave of ease passed over her hardened features. "Okay," she said before she stood and smoothed out her dress. "I'll be leaving then. I'll let you get back to your new life as a student. It was really nice to see you again, Wally." Rather than wait for another hug, Carrie walked out from the lobby and towards the door.

"You too," Wallace said under his breath before he decided to walk her out.

Carrie stopped in the doorway and grabbed a black umbrella from a stand beside the door and walked out into the storm. In just the few minutes of their meeting the onset of rain had become a downpour that blacked out the sky and pelted the courtyard with globs of rain that pooled on the stone.

Stepping out into the storm, Carrie popped open the umbrella that resembled wings arranged in a circular pattern and slipped on a large pair of black glasses. "Wallace, the authorities in charge of searching through student records will have clearance to request Andrew's records from the university soon, so we'll know more then. I know how you feel about him, so hopefully this news will bring us closer to the truth."

"What's your truth?" Wallace asked, loudly to be heard over the storm.

"Nothing Andrew does surprises me," Carrie said, her face wrinkling into a frown. "When he agreed to act as the poster boy for your father's invention I knew it was to make Charles happy. When he continued to travel I knew it was because Arlan pressured it upon him and as a result Charles did the same. And honestly, taking off again after returning home wouldn't surprise me either, hoping to escape both Arlan and Charles, but it's you, you're the wildcard."

"Me?" Wallace gulped, feeling lightheaded.

"As much as I love my son and as much I believe he loves me, I know he wouldn't give up the notoriety and attention he's gained for my sake," Carrie said as she stepped back towards the doorway and gently grabbed Wallace's chin. "In a perfect world Andrew gives up the life set out for him by his and your father, and comes to stay with me, finds a nice girl, and settles down. But as long as you're around there's no way that's happening. But you, he would give it up for you, for the chance to recreate your friendship with him, to make up for lost time. But if you are telling the truth, that you haven't seen him and that you don't know where he is."

"I am telling the truth," Wallace said, unable to keep himself from trembling in close quarters with Carrie.

"If you are telling the truth, then I'm afraid something really has happened to him," Carrie said. "There's no way he'd leave you out of his plans and if you're in the dark with the rest of us then maybe Andrew isn't the position to make choices for himself anymore. Maybe that right has been taken away."

"Taken away," Wallace repeated.

"Don't think ill of me," Carrie said as she released his hold on Wallace's face and headed down the steps into the flooding courtyard. "But with no kidnapping circumstance on the table, no plans with you present, I can't help but think Andrew may be dead."

Carrie's voice faded away under the crushing pelt of rain against the building's exterior and Wallace watched under her dark figure blended into the storm before he slowly backed up into the lobby. Heart thumping wildly in his chest, Wallace eyed the stairs to the basement and the doors into the dorm halls, opting to avoid Garret if he was in their room, Wallace took the stairs down to the basement and logged into one of the computers in the vacant lobby.

Wallace glanced to his shoulders and found that at some point during his talk with Carrie spinarak had taken back his spot across Wallace's chest and elgyem was laying across his shoulder, snoozing.

Without any real plan in mind on how to waste time or keep his mind from racing with theories, Wallace found himself navigating to and scrolling through the stream of pictures submitted of Andrew. He'd checked the site the day before while still in the Health and Wellness Center, and just a day later there seemed to be hundreds of new pictures and thousands of new comments.

After diving far enough into the website to have reached all of the comments he read the day before, Wallace navigated to the university's website where he managed to log into his student email after several unsuccessful attempts. Despite having been on campus for just a few days and knowing hardly anyone, his inbox was full with spam emails and notifications from the school about activities to fill the week of orientation.

Absently, and with a shaking hand, he clicked through each of them to mark them as read, but paused when a large picture loaded with the contents of an email not sent by the school. In the email he saw a picture of a staircase that had been attached to the email. The stairs were nothing special, a narrow stairway in someone's house with carpet lining the stairs and a wooden railing. But under the picture, the caption froze Wallace's blood.

 _Just in case  
_ _Let me remind you  
_ _About a boy  
_ _Named... Andrew Gates_

The clock ticked away and the lounge's silence grew heavy, with only the sound of Wallace's breathing and the light of the computer to give it any life. Wallace stared at the words until they were seared into his mind, the image of an ordinary staircase a haunting reminder of his crime and the fact that his secret, wasn't just his any longer.

With trembling hands Wallace pushed away from the desk and climbed out of the chair, retreating to one of the armchairs in the basement. Suddenly he felt cold and very tired, but couldn't take his eyes off the computer screen.

As Wallace curled up into the armchair, feeling sleep taking hold of him, elgyem clambered down from his shoulder and came to rest on his chest beside spinarak, his small arms forming a hold around Wallace's neck. Wallace rubbed a pattern into the small pokémon's back as his mind buzzed with everything he had to think about now.

He'd only been Wallace Peters for a few days, but it seemed like his new life was becoming as messy as his old one. Even if Andrew was gone, his presence was alive and thriving on campus. People knew him, wanted him here, and in a sick twist of irony who they got was the person responsible for Andrew's death. Wallace listened to elgyem's shallow breathing against his neck while the watched the glow from the computer screen grow dimmer and dimmer until sleep took over.

* * *

End of Chapter Eleven

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Back again with a new chapter, also with a treat. An off-site friend of mine, DonovanX, once created a TvTropes page for another fic of mine and he's done it again for Yearning. If you want to check it out, Google 'yearning for the mud tvtropes' and it'll be your first result, it's an open site for anyone to edit with info and tropes about the story.

 **Question of the Chapter #10:** With things closing in around Wallace following Andrew's mom visiting and the reveal that someone else knows about Andrew's death, do you think Wallace can keep up his lies, or will he be forced to come clean?


	12. Pacify

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Twelve – Pacify**

 _H_ _ome is where one starts from. - T.S. Eliot_

Wallace's weary and sleep speckled eyes scanned the room. It was the size of a small house and rose in tiers, each row holding six seats with attached desks, and nearly every seat was filled except one up front in the dead center.

The short time he'd been awake that morning had been a blur, his mind unable to stop whirling, like a blender gone rouge, but as all eyes in the room focused on him, a single thought emerged from the chaos in his skull: the start to his new life wasn't going great.

"Are you listening to me?"

A tower of man stood off to his right, the fluorescent lights of the classroom illuminating the sharp features of his aged and pale face. He ran a hand over his hair, grey and dense, that laid back on his head, a few strands standing out wildly near the back. His clothes reminded Wallace of his AD, John, dark slacks and a light colored shirt. However, unlike John, the man had a wide chest and thick arms that looked capable of crushing someone's neck during a headlock. Wallace's eyes trailed down his red tie and then to a gilded brooch pinned to the man's chest with a ruby resting in its center.

"Young man, what is your name?"

"Wallace!"

For a brief moment, lost under the swell of his own exhaustion, Wallace actually thought he had said his name, but when he gave the classroom another gander, he found Ignatius subtly waving at him from two rows up, mouth agape.

The man turned his attention and seemed to lock Ignatius in the crossfire of his pearl black eyes. "Thank you, Mr. Mercer, but I was speaking to our tardy friend," he said. "Wallace is it?"

Wallace managed to nod, his brain booting up like a severely outdated computer.

"Do you have a last name?" The man moved to a small table at the front of the room and grabbed a folder off it.

"Peters," Wallace said as his eyes drifted to three blackboards that were mounted on the wall behind the table.

"Mr. Peters, you're late. Class starts at eight o'clock on the dot," the man said.

 **DR.** **A** **LOYSIUS E. SUTCLIFFE** was written in giant bold letters across the middle board, the last name was also circled. Above it, the class name was written on the board, Research 220: Pokémon Theory & Ethics II.

"I would suggest arriving 15 minutes early to properly prepare yourself for my lectures." Dr. Sutcliffe threw a look over his shoulder to a wall clock. "What I would not suggest, is arriving to my class 17 minutes late, or any time past eight that you feel is appropriate to grace us with your presence. Thank you for disrupting the lecture for all the students who managed to get here on time."

Dr. Sutcliffe gesticulated to the class and Wallace followed his hand, spotting another familiar face, Neo's, at the far end of the first row, apparently bored with the bout of public humiliation Wallace was enduring, as he was folded over his tablet, the device reflecting an array of lights across the boy's glasses.

"I need you to wait in the hallway until class is finished. I'll speak with you then." Dr. Sutcliffe flicked his wrist towards the door before he turned and grabbed an eraser from the holder below the blackboards.

Wallace wavered in his spot, but didn't make any effort to leave. He watched the rows of students, some had immediately acted in response to the professor and were pulling out notebooks and pens, but others were still watching him and occasionally whispering to their neighbor.

"Mr. Peters, do you have something else you'd like to waste my time with?" Dr. Sutcliffe asked.

Wallace wet his lips and looked back to the professor who had begun glaring at him. "N-No," he managed to say.

"Then the hallway awaits," Dr. Sutcliffe replied with a flourish of the hand.

Wallace backed away slowly, his hands groping blindly for the door, as he looked back to the students. Many more were watching him now and making inaudible comments as he left the room. Two girls in the front row looked to be seconds away from bursting with laughter as they did peeked at him, whispered to each other, and then cupped their hands to their mouths to contain their giggles.

In the hallway he stepped away from the door and climbed into a thin high chair that sat in pairs around a circular table with a diameter so small his propped elbows kept slipping off, still trying to process his morning thus far.

 _The sound of voices and the shuffling of chairs startled Wallace into waking up from the fetal position he curled into in the armchair. The basement of the ICO had filled with students using the computers, many of which were enjoying a morning laugh at Wallace's expense. Elgyem and spinarak were equally as out of it as he rushed back to his room, thankful Garret was gone as he changed clothes without bothering to venture to the bathroom to wash up and scavenged around the room for his schedule. His next twenty minutes were spent jogging across campus in search of his classroom in Myrrh Hall, a building not far from the ICO._

Despite not wanting to, Wallace stayed in the hallway for the better part of an hour, out of fear of what the professor might say if he left and never came back. There were no bells in Myrrh, but roughly ten minutes before nine o'clock classroom doors started to open and students spilled out, all heading to one of the two exits.

Eventually, the door to Research 220 opened and students wandered out, conversations in full swing. Wallace slipped off the high chair and waited for Neo or Ignatius to come out, but they were among the last and emerged followed by the professor. As if Professor Sutcliffe knew Wallace's intention, he kept his large hands on the boy's shoulders and dismissed them, verbally and physically, without giving any of them the chance to speak to one another, before he ushered Wallace into the classroom.

"Have a seat," Professor Sutcliffe said.

Wallace walked slowly to the seat that had remained empty during the class and slid into it, the grey plastic cold through his jeans.

"I take it this was your first class of the day?" Professor Sutcliffe asked over his shoulder as he began to erase the three blackboards, each filled with walls of text and formulas.

"Yes, sir," he said, adding the sir for good measure.

"Mr. Peters, if this start is an indication of how the rest of your semester will go, would you consider it a success or a failure?" Professor Sutcliffe asked once the boards were clean. He clapped his hands together and dug through a folder on the table, fishing out a thick packet.

"Um, failure?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"Telling you," Wallace said, trying to deepen his voice to match the baritone of the professor's.

"Well, that's the wrong answer," Professor Sutcliffe said as he rounded the table and slapped the packet down in front of Wallace. "The correct answer would have been to say the poor start to your academic career does not have to define the rest of it."

"Okay." Wallace flipped through the packet, a syllabus for the semester that detailed all of their assignments and lecture topics as well as the grading scale and several important university policies. Plagiarism was the biggest bullet on the list of university no-no's. Wallace flipped the packet closed and wondered how much the university would frown on murder and assuming a false identity.

"Now, welcome to Research 220. Pokémon Theory and Ethics," Dr. Sutcliffe said. "Mr. Peters, do you know what a theory is?"

"Um, it's like an idea, that people have to figure something out," Wallace said off the top of his head.

"Crude, but yes." Professor Sutcliffe physically cringed and slowly nodded. "Do you know what ethics are?"

Although he had a solid grasp of what an ethic was, Wallace had a more pertinent response to his question. "I'm sorry, professor, but what's happening?" Wallace asked, gesturing weakly to the space between them.

"I'm about to start a lecture, Mr. Peters. What did you think was happening?" Professor Sutcliffe asked with narrowed eyes as he crossed his arms over his chest, his body language reading as if Wallace's question had offended him.

"Professor." Wallace let his mouth hang open for a moment as his mind put the pieces together. "I have another class at nine. I can't stay for a lecture." Wallace ran his hand around the back of his upper thigh, feeling his folded up schedule in his back pocket.

"You want to be on time for your nine o'clock, but your eight o'clock class can suffer?" Professor Sutcliffe asked as his eyes seem to narrow into slits. "Is that your method of thinking?"

"I was only late by a little bit," Wallace said, shrugging carefree.

"Mr. Peters, I do not believe in a little or a lot. We live in a world of exacts, black and white, there is no room for grey." Professor Sutcliffe rested his hands on the edge of the table and squatted to take a seat. "If you develop a theory to explain why every known fossil pokémon has dual typing, one of them being rock, your theory is either right or wrong. It doesn't matter how close to the truth you were, or how far, wrong is wrong. Late is late."

Wallace exhaled and slumped down into his seat. "But don't you have another class to teach?" he asked nervously as he glanced to the door, hoping a horde of students would walk through the door by sheer willpower.

"Nice try." Professor Sutcliffe stood and moved towards the blackboards. "I always request to have my classes scheduled an hour apart for situations like these. You're not the first student to believe they can skate by around me, nor will you be the last." Professor Sutcliffe turned back and looked Wallace up and down. "You don't have any paper or a pencil," he said before he pressed his hands onto the table and hung his head. "Well, I hope you've got a good memory."

* * *

By the time Wallace left Professor Sutcliffe's class the wall clock in the hallway told him his nine o'clock class had just ended. Cutting his loses, Wallace fast walked from Myrrh Hall to make it to his third class, one building over. He arrived at Neroli Hall, which sat adjacent to Myrrh, on the right, and located his classroom on the second floor with relative ease.

With soft brown tiles and brick walls, painted a smooth white, the room looked more like the classroom he imagined. It was about slightly smaller than the previous room and filled with wooden tables with blacktops. The teacher's desk sat the front of the class with am older man lounging behind it.

Wallace scanned the heads that were already in their seats, and found a few he recognized. Neo and Garret were sitting in the back row on the far side of the room, sharing a table, and the only available seat was right beside him near the door. He didn't bother asking the girl sitting at one of the seats if she minded, instead he yanked the chair out, startling her, and plopped down. Despite still not having any supplies, he was on time, and all he wanted was to not be chewed out again, he hoped a seat in the far back would ensure that.

"Wallace?"

Wallace paused before scooting his chair in to see he'd taken seat beside Simone, the sight of her causing him to pause. "Simone," he said, her name falling out of his mouth like a question, almost unable to comprehend their meeting as the last time he saw her Chara nearly strangled her in the abandoned mansion.

Instinctively, his eyes fell to her neck that seemed blemish free and a pang of jealously struck his chest. Neither he nor Eleanor were able to leave the island without a scar, it seemed only right they all bare a physical reminder of that day. But that thought quickly turned sour in his mind as he thought about Dirk, who wasn't able to leave the island at all. "How are you?" he managed to ask when he found her eyes, brown and speckled like dark stone, again.

"Fine, and you?" Simone asked, her eyes looking Wallace up and down.

Wallace grimaced, unsure of how to answer, and instead he only bobbed his head.

"You must be having a shitty first day of school, or you're feeling about as good as I do after this weekend. Either way, I get it if you don't want to talk," Simone said as she propped her arms up on the blacktop of their shared table and stared ahead, her fingers lacing in front of her face. "I haven't really wanted to talk to anyone either, but Ben, he won't stop coming by and checking on me. Him and the officers from Public Safety, they're about the only people I've seen since the safari. Were you at the tournament?"

"Yeah," Wallace said, unsure of how to respond, or to what he was responding to.

"Wallace," Simone said softly.

Wallace raised his brows, catching Simone watching him out of the corner of her eye.

"I just needed to say thanks," she said.

"For what?" he asked.

Simone sucked in a deep breath and straightened up. "We were heading back to check on the storm, and I was leading the way, and all of a sudden I hear this sound." Simone paused, her eyes squinting and her lips curling up in what Wallace recognized as disgust. "Like, when you use scissors to sheer open wrapping paper? It was like that, was louder and wetter, and then I heard something splatter on the floor and then I looked back and Dirk was down. Flailing like a 'karp, gasping and twitching before he started to get real still. I can still see it, when I close my eyes, blood shooting out of his neck."

Wallace rolled a ball of spit across his tongue, unable to swallow with the thought of hot blood in his mind. In a flicker of memory, like a bulb exploding with light, Wallace saw Dirk's vacant eyes staring up and the knife gash across his neck. The sound of his head striking the bottom of the staircase was something he'd never forget.

"I froze," Simone said, her tone implying it was an unforgivable act. "He struck Ben, and then he was behind me and I couldn't breathe. I saw you coming down and I wanted to tell you to run, to save yourself. I'm not the type to give up, or go down without a fight, but I couldn't help but feel like I might die and there was nothing I could do about it."

Wallace watched her chest fall with the release of a held breath before she dabbed at the corner of her eye and then flicked her fingers away, as if she was physically removing tears from her presence. "Anyway," she said, her voice harder than before. "I was only out for a little bit. But I heard you and Chara upstairs. I heard him come running down the steps. I was so freaked I just laid there and listened to him swearing, screaming your name, just so loud, it was insane." Simone paused and hung her head, pressing her knuckles into her temples before she rubbed them in circles. "What I'm trying to say is, that wasn't me. I don't get led into dangerous situations like that blind. People don't fool me, but Chara, something about her, or him, whatever, I don't know. It got to me and I let my guard down. And now Dirk is... He's still out there," Simone said.

Wallace bit at the inside of his cheek, by the corner of his mouth. "Hm?"

"Chara. He's somewhere out there, free, and probably planning to trap some other students in that house, or wherever he came from because that's the kind of sick person he is. For his sake the officers better find him before I do," Simone said.

"You're not going to go looking for him, are you?" Wallace asked, his voice weak as he tried to push away the latest image of a dead body from his mind.

"No." Simone cast him another sideways glance before she shrugged. "But he better not come looking for me either. People like that, they never forget the ones that get away."

Wallace's forehead wrinkled in worry, but before he could say anything Simone fired back with another question.

"You coming to the meeting tonight?" she asked with a whip of her head in his direction, her silk black hair draping over her shoulder. She must had read the look of confusion on Wallace's face, because her lips spread into a smile. "The university sent out emails about a therapy workshop or something, supposed to help with stress and anxiety in the wake of traumatic events. Those aren't my words, that's what the email said, 'in the wake of traumatic events'. So, Wallace, been through any traumatic events lately?" she said as she furrowed her trimmed brows into a look of faux concern.

Wallace felt the corner of his lips curling up at the emphasis Simone put on the word _traumatic_. "Too many for one lifetime," he replied.

Simone seemed to nod with thought. "I don't want to go, seems pretty stupid, some university stranger poking their noses into our business, but Ben said he'd drag me if I refused. I'm tempted to put up that fight, but if you tag along maybe it won't be so bad. Between you and Ben you seem to be the only taking this as well as I am."

"How's Ben acting?" Wallace asked.

"Like, a survivor, hopeful and optimistic," Simone said. "Nothing wrong with that, I guess, I just can't feel the same way. I feel like if I let my guard down, for even a second, something bad is going to happen. So, the meeting?"

Wallace leaned back in his chair and found Neo in his usual position, leaned over and glued to his tablet screen. Garret was turned in his seat so that his back was all Wallace could see, as if he was purposefully trying to avoid eye contact. "Sure, I'll go," Wallace said.

"It starts at six," Simone said before the professor at the front of the class stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. The man fastened a button on his suit jacket and moved calmly to the front of the room. Like Professor Sutcliffe, he was well dressed, perhaps a bit too formal for a classroom, in a grey three-piece suit. The man's skin was dark and his black hair gathered in small curls near his scalp.

"Welcome to UC 130, also known as the Study of Evolution. I am Dr. Shalom Till," he said. "Assuming you all understand the basic principles behind evolution, we will not be starting our semester there." Professor Till spoke to the class in a cold and monotone voice, his dark eyes never landing on a student, rather they focused on a spot above all their heads while he spoke. "Your first assignment; however, will be over the different methods of evolution. The results will determine the pace we take this course." He turned from the class and moved with ease to the chalkboard behind him and wrote, in wide strikes, on the board. "We will focus on the biology of a pokémon's evolution, genomics, and whether or not evolution is a proper title for it."

Many of the students who came prepared with notebooks and pens and were furiously writing all of the professors words. Wallace considered asking Simone for supplies, but she hadn't moved an inch and was silently staring at the board.

"I don't believe in hand outs, all of your classwork will need to be completed online through the university's site for students to access courses online," Professor Till said as he moved back to his seat. "Your first assignment is a test, 40 questions, due Wednesday. Class dismissed."

The room filled with silence as the professor started writing something at his desk. A low chatter started up after the silence and eventually the professor peered up at the class. "Why are you still here? Leave," he said.

Wallace, along with the rest of the class, needed no more prodding before they started to leave their seats. After saying bye to Simone, Wallace waited in the hall for Neo and Garret, but while glancing around the halls he caught sight of Garret, cowering and rushing down the hall, away from him. When he turned back, Neo stood before him, an unreadable expression on his face.

"He said you blew him off last night. I could tell he's upset, or hurt at least," Neo said as they left Neroli together and headed to the ICO to stop by Wallace's room to retrieve elgyem and spinarak, both of whom he'd left behind in his room after his shower.

While he let his pokémon claim their spots on his shoulder and across his chest, respectfully, Wallace realized he was slightly thankful Garret hadn't returned to their room, unsure of how their next meeting would play-out. After grabbing a few things from his bookstore order, still sitting in piles around his room, Wallace backed out of the room and locked it behind him.

"I didn't mean any of it, not really," Wallace said as rejoined Neo in the hall. "I'm just on edge I guess," Wallace said without any air of regret for rebuffing Garret's friendly advances. "Your room?" he asked as he followed Neo out of the hall and towards the main stairwell. As Wallace expected, Neo wanted to finish Professor Till's assignment as soon as possible.

"Yeah," Neo said as he led the way to the floor below. "I don't know how well ignoring your roommate is going to work out for you," he said as he navigated brick and tile hallways, all in a blue-green color pattern, before they reached his room, the door of which was marked by two handmade name tags, one for Neo and the other marked for CHRISTOPHER.

"Avoiding, not ignoring." Wallace watched the hall, empty as everyone else was either asleep or still in a class, as Neo unlocked the door and let him inside.

Judging by the inside of the room, Wallace would have guessed Neo was the only one living there, as only half of the room had been decorated, or appeared lived in at all. The far side of the room was filled with trainer supplies, all stacked neatly away in shelves or on top of desk that seemed to be the definition of organized clutter. The bed was well made and covered in fabrics, all in varying shades of green, with a large calendar hanging above it, every square already filled in with pen marks.

Wallace cast his eyes upon the dresser that was stacked with different toiletries and personal hygiene items as he turned to close the door, but was shocked to find a face staring back at him. He jumped from his spot and clutched at his chest before realizing the face belonged to a poster hung on the back of the door. Kicking the door shut, the full length of the poster was revealed to be a woman frolicking on a beach in a hot pink bikini. "Oh, hello," Wallace said in mild surprise.

The sound of the door slamming shut seemed to cause a reaction in the bed beside Wallace as something under a mass of blankets shifted.

Neo pulled his glasses off his face and folded them down onto the desk. "That's Christopher, something's wrong with him," he said, his green eyes focused on the now still form under the sheets.

Wallace waited until the last minute to take his eyes off Christopher, waiting to see if he'd rear his head, but ultimately looked away as he moved to sit on Neo's bed.

"Ah, ah, ah!" Neo bleated as he shooed Wallace away.

"What?" Wallace asked as he wobbled away from the bed, nearly losing his footing.

"Sit at the desk," Neo said and flicked his wrist out to the wooden chair. "I prefer not to have boys on my bed."

Wallace rolled his eyes in elgyem's direction as he took the seat at the desk and began pulling supplies from under his arm. "What, is someone going to walk in and see me doing homework on your bed and think we're gay?" Wallace asked as he pulled elgyem from his shoulder and placed him on the desk.

"The odds of that are slim, but you never know." Neo eased down onto his bed and detached his tablet from his arm. "I did invite Ellie to come over if she wanted."

Wallace paused in the middle of stroking spinarak's back as he looked to Neo. "Ellie?"

"Safari guide, almost died a few days ago," Neo said, drawing out every other word. "Ringing any bells?"

"Yeah, I remember, vividly, because I was there, but why did you invite her?" Wallace asked.

"I figured she could use some comfort during this time," Neo said.

"And you think comforting her is going to get her to date you?" Wallace asked. "Why do you even like her? What do you know about her?"

"Well, let's see." Neo tapped his tablet screen to life and began to scroll.

"You know what? Forget I asked, because I'm honestly scared of what information you already have on her," Wallace said, holding his hand up to Neo.

Neo shrugged. "Fine, then lets hurry and knock out Professor Till's assignment now, it shouldn't take long, only 40 questions," he said as he tapped away on his tablet's screen before he turned it towards Wallace, showing him the page of the assignment.

Wallace looked at the tablet before he glanced down to the new laptop before him, a purchase from the bookstore's registry that Ignatius talked him into. "Okay, one second." Wallace experimented with the laptop by pressing a few buttons, grinning in surprise as the computer booted up. "I got it on," he cheered before he looked to Neo who was glaring back.

"Congratulations, would you like a gold star?" Neo asked. "Maybe a reward when you log into your email next time? You can't be this inept at everything."

"I'm not," Wallace said as he fumbled through connecting to the university's internet and launching the pre-loaded browser. "I'm just used to using the laptops my father manufactured for trainers."

"Yeah?" Neo asked, already absorbed back into his tablet. "What's your dad do? Software development or something?"

Innocuous as his question sounded, Wallace still felt a pin prick of fear quickly swell in his chest as a bit of old life easily slipped free of his mouth. "Uh no, he works in a factory, making laptops."

"Are you at the website yet?" Neo asked, already onto the next topic. "We should time ourselves to see who finishes the questions first."

"It's not a competition, and I'm working on it," Wallace said, pleased he slid his lie past Neo. Focusing back to the task before him, he navigated to the university's official site and then through a list of student services to find a site called uLearn that held dropdown menus for all of his classes. While listening to Neo's impatient sighs and explanations as to why it _was_ a competition, Wallace multi-tasked between locating the assignment and keeping elgyem's curious hands from mashing down all the keys at once. "I'm there," he said once he had finally secured elgyem between his thighs and loaded Professor Till's assignment.

The squeak of bedsprings and a rustle startled Wallace and reminded him that Christopher was still in bed behind him. He turned to see if the boy had decided to get up, but the mass of covers were still pulled tight over him, forming a large cocoon on the bed.

"Let's start." Neo said with a quick tap of his tablet's screen.

Wallace pursed his lips as he turned back to his laptop and scrolled to find the first question.

 **1.) When the level 50, second-stage evolution in the line of soft-tissue pokémon, reaches its point of evolution under precipitating weather conditions, what will happen? Answer below in short-answer format.**

"What?" Wallace asked before he looked to his left to find Neo typing expertly on his tablet, his fingers never slowing or missing a beat despite lacking a keyboard. "What's a soft-tissue pokémon?"

Neo let out a throaty chuckle, but never took his eyes off his tablet. "Very funny, like you don't know about goomy."

"Is that the answer?" Wallace whispered back before he looked to his test and slowly typed G-O-O-M-E. "Is this how it's spelling? Fingers crossed." Wallace reluctantly entered his question before he was presented with another.

According to his laptop's clock a solid half hour had passed by the time Wallace entered the answer for his final question. Neo, having finished his test nearly twenty-five minutes ago, returned to his room with two cans of pop in his hands. "Didju finish?" he asked around a bad of chips between his teeth.

"Yup," Wallace said as he stroked elgyem's head, for luck, as he waited for the spinning wheel on his screen to reveal his score. Neo's tablet remained on the bed, a bright green bar showing on the screen that congratulated Neo on his perfect score. "Fingers crossed guys," Wallace said to his pokemon and looked down to see spinarak hanging limply by the collar of his shirt, making a sound Wallace guessed had to be what pokémon sounded like when they snored. Elgyem blinked the yellow digits on his hands in wavering thoughts, apparently not confident in Wallace's score.

"Oh, it's loading," Neo said as he eased up behind the chair.

Wallace smiled through his pursed lips as the wheel slowed to a stop and an angry looking red bar appeared on screen, showing his score of 0%. "I failed?" he gasped. "I didn't even get the first one right? What about the pokémon you told me? It's spelled G-O-O-M-E, right?" Wallace asked, his voice tight, as he turned and looked up to Neo.

Neo grabbed his glasses from the desk and slid them back on his face, squinting at the screen in apparent disbelief. "Zero out of forty questions correct, that's impressive, in the worst way. And it's spelled G-O-O-M-Y, goomy, and that wasn't even the answer to the first question, it was goodra. The level 50, second-stage evolution in the line of soft-tissue pokémon is sliggoo and it evolves into goodra when it rains."

Neo let out a long exhale through his nostrils as he stood up and tugged at a strip of his hair. "How is it possible that you got none of them right? There were at least six questions about Unova, and one specially asked about elgyem. I don't know what to say," he said, shaking his head as he sat back on his bed.

Wallace bit his lip and wrung his hands together in worry, the red failing score looking worse and worse by the second. "Is there a do-over?" he asked as he started pressing random keys.

"This is a highly accredited private university, there are no do-overs. Wallace, this is going to set our curriculum back a bit," Neo said as he removed his glasses again and rubbed his face. "We're going to be learning about evolution stones for months if your score brings down the average far enough. Thanks."

Wallace let a self-depreciating smile cross his face as he folded his hands in his lap, embarrassed as much as he was ashamed of his score.

After coming to grips with his first failed assignment, Wallace stayed in Neo's room, the two of them going over practice assignments already loaded into Professor Till's online classroom before Neo took over Wallace's laptop and downloaded what he deemed to be the best software for him to have. By the time he was done, Wallace noticed his applications folder was nearly twice as full and his laptop seemed to be running much faster.

"Is that one necessary?" Wallace asked as he ran his finger over the trackpad and the pointer landed on a glossy icon in the shape of a Poké Ball with a camera lens in the center instead of the locking button.

Neo bowed down to squint at screen. "PokéView? Of course it's necessary. Visiting the site isn't enough, you need to have all the access and features to watch other battles if you're going to become great."

"I'd settle for average right now," Wallace muttered under his breath. The sight of the too familiar icon twisted Wallace's stomach into small knots before the sound of creaking bed springs disturbed his thoughts. Wallace glanced over his shoulder in time to see Christopher rising from his bed like a machine. With slow and precise movements he sat straight up and pulled away his covers.

Christopher slid off his bed, fully dressed in baggy jeans and several layers on his upper body that made him look bulky, despite being on the short side as Wallace noted. Christopher's dark skin and straight locks of hair shone under the lone light in the center of the ceiling, both visibly slick with accumulated oil.

"Hi," Wallace said.

Neo turned and propped himself against the desk while Christopher regarded Wallace with a cock of his head and a vacant squint of his light eyes. Wallace fumbled for something else to say, but fell mute under the silent air that surrounded Christopher, and before he could think of something to say, Christopher was out the door, gone just as quietly as he had risen from bed.

"He seems, uh," Wallace said and turned back in his chair and picked at his nails, scraping deep into the volumes of his vocabulary for an accurate description.

"Weird," Neo said flatly. "Don't sugar coat it, he's weird. Hasn't said a word to me since he moved in, why do you think I keep hanging around you and Garret?"

"I thought it was my dazzling personality," Wallace smiled before he shrugged before he went back to rubbing elgyem's head. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"

"Nope," Neo said. "I heard he got called into the tournament yesterday and it wasn't pretty."

"I thought you could decline to battle, just don't go onto the field," Wallace said.

"You can," Neo said, his voice high and his eyebrows raised. "But when you're quiet like that, people take advantage of you. I heard some upperclassmen forced him onto the field and he freaked out, starting yelling and panicking. He only has one pokémon, a bulbasaur, and he went up against some Cinnabar Island prodigy who wiped the arena with him. His bulbasaur was taken to the infirmary immediately for burn treatment."

"That makes me kind of sad," Wallace said as he looked back to the door, wishing Christopher would walk back in, this time he'd be ready with some encouraging or kind words. But that never happened, every noise in the hall cause Wallace to tense up, hoping Christopher would return and he'd get the chance to make a better impression, but the morning bled past noon and shortly before two Wallace left Neo's room and headed straight for his last class of the day in the Origin Center.

He had just made it inside the room before the system of bells in the building went off and a crowd of loitering students wandered into the second floor classroom. The room was sterile, grey fabric walls designed to keep noises in, with matching thin carpet. Unremarkable desks were arranged in columns that led to a wide and flat grey metal desk before a wall that held three gleaming marker boards.

With only the back of heads to go off, Wallace found it hard to find someone familiar in the room. As he wandered around the outskirts of the room students began piling into seats near the back of the room, leaving a few options open in the front row.

"Wallace."

A soft voice called Wallace to the front of the room where he found Arlette's roommate, Tempest, turned around in her seat, her complex braid of silver-blonde hair draped over her shoulder.

Wallace quickly made it to the front of the room and slipped into the empty seat beside her. "Thanks," he said under his breath as he looked over to Tempest's row. Dressed in an oversized dress shirt and dark jeans, slumped casually at her desk, Wallace couldn't help but entertain the thought that perhaps Tempest had run away from a former life as well, but unlike him, she'd mastered the look of a middle class trainer. Still, despite her attempt to look average, with the shocking contrast of her light hair and eyes, the color of the ocean during a storm, against her bronze skin, he couldn't help but think she belonged somewhere else, on the arm of a socialite perhaps.

When Wallace pulled back from his thought he realized he'd been staring at Tempest the entire time, her face now turned in his direction, a look of curiosity fresh across her features. "What?" Wallace breathed.

Tempest's cheeks caught the room's light as she smiled. "I didn't say anything, but is there something on my face? You're staring."

"Uh, no, you're face is fine. There's nothing wrong with your face." Wallace struggled through his words and silently prayed for a distraction when the classroom door creaked open.

A slender dark skinned man stumbled through the doorway, a tall stack of papers in his long arms, and a look of expectant fear on his face. Despite wobbling across the room while dodging book bags and wandering pokémon belonging to the students, the man made it to the desk at the front without dropping anything. He hunched over and let the stack slip away from his arms before he straightened up and sighed.

"Ah, welcome to Training 100: Type Balancing," the man said as he placed his hands on his hips for a brief second before he turned and scanned the row of marker boards. He grabbed a marker from the holding tray and haphazardly wrote the class name across the middle board followed by his name. "I'm Professor Xanthel Ishimaru, but I'd like it if you called me Xan. My friends call me Xan, and if you let me, I'd like to be your friend."

Xan seemed to be an odd combination of Wallace's previous professors, he was dressed just as formally as Professors Sutcliffe and Till in an ironed dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and the top button undone, and slacks. Despite looking and sounding rather young, Wallace could see rows of wrinkles forming around the curves of Xan's face whenever he regarded the class with a smile, which in the few minutes of his introduction, was often.

"I know how awkward the first day of classes can be, so we'll skip the part where I make you introduce yourselves and get straight to the fun stuff," Xan grabbed a packet from the stack and shook it until it stood upright in his grasp. "A fun little multiple choice quiz to see how well you know your pokémon types and how the rules of advantages can change in battle."

Xan moved up and down the rows, sliding packets before the students while he gave brief directions on a bonus questions. "The last page is blank, I want you to come up with a question or scenario regarding types where effectiveness is altered, that you'll present to the class on Wednesday. You'll have until the end of class to finish and when you're done, you're free to go," Xan said the last part with a goofy frown and a wave of his hands, as if he had no desire to hold students any longer than necessary. "Or if you'd like you can take the quiz home with you, it just needs to be finished by the start of class Wednesday."

Several students took Xan up on his offer and left the class immediately, but as Wallace saw Tempest making no move to leave, he too remained behind. He tapped his fingers on the desk around his packet, unable to start, even if he wanted to, due to the lack of a pencil. As he flipped through the packet, skimming the questions, spinarak climbed off his chest and took to biting at the ends of the pages as Wallace flipped them, the small pokémon taking each page turn as a challenge.

"Need a pencil?"

Again, Wallace found himself saved by Tempest who, once he looked over, was holding a mechanical pencil out to him. "Thanks," he said as he reached to grab it, making the effort to grab it near the top to brush fingers with her.

The small bit of contact didn't seem to go unnoticed as Tempest smiled and then pulled back, fingering back a strand of her hair to busy her hand.

"Can I ask a question?" Wallace asked, quietly, despite Xan's relaxed demeanor, he didn't want to be labeled as a cheater.

"When in doubt, always pick C," Tempest whispered back before she looked his way. "What is it?" she said with a smile.

"Have you heard anything about Arlette?" Wallace asked as he tapped the end of the pencil to draw out a few centimeters of lead. "I mean, any news?"

Tempest pursed her lips as she set her eyes into surveying Wallace. "I'm just her roommate, I don't think anyone would tell me anything anyway.

Wallace nodded with thought, despite her not actually giving him an answer, he decided to let it go. He looked to his quiz, absently filling in the bubble for C for the first question dealing with the changes of weather on the battlefield. "Anymore notes, or people writing on your window?"

Tempest shook her pencil between her fingers and tapped her foot on the floor a few times before she looked back to Wallace. "That hasn't stopped. I told public safety and they put a guard outside my room, but you know."

"I'm sorry," he replied as he picked an answer for the second question at random.

"They'll get bored soon or later, and move on to the next big thing," Tempest said. "But it's understandable, people are angry, which is why I hope Arlette is innocent, maybe that'll be enough to pacify them."

Wallace nodded as he scribbled in whatever bubble his pencil lead landed on for the next several answers, having to bat away spinarak just to turn his pages. "Which types are unaffected by sandstorm conditions?" Wallace asked under his breath, looking to elgyem for help, but was only rewarded with a large shrug from his pokémon. "Well, I already failed one assignment today, might as well make it tw –"

Wallace's voice caught in his throat as the room hummed to life with the buzzing of phones. Even Xan shifted in his seat as he pulled a phone from the front pocket of his shirt. "What's happening?" Wallace asked to Tempest while he turned in his seat, there were barely a dozen of students left, but they all gawked at their phones, meanwhile he was sure his was lying under his bed in his dorm.

"It's an alert from the campus security system," Tempest said as she slid her phone onto Wallace's desk. "They send out emails and texts when there's trouble."

Wallace's eyes zeroed in on a large blue box within Tempest's messaging app. **RED ALERT: Report of assault at the docks. White male, long brown hair, striped sweater, brown pants. On foot towards Origin Center, evacuation to begin immediately.**

Wallace's hands fell away from the phone, the words on the page echoing in the back of his mind as his blood ran cold.

"Damn," Xan snapped as he rose to his feet. "This is highly inappropriate of me to ask, but do have of you have psychic pokémon? Or any pokémon that knows how to teleport?"

Over the pounding of blood in his ears, Wallace heard a few students response in the back of the class. Trembling, Wallace slowly looked to elgyem who blinked the green digits on his hands back at his trainer. "I-I do," he stammered.

"Good," Xan said as he looked past Wallace, acknowledging other students. "Assuming you are all first years gather together and use your pokémon to return to the Civet Complex. In case of emergencies, always return to your dormitories, they are the safest buildings on campus for you."

His hands began to jitter as Tempest's phone vibrated across the desk with an incoming message. In chorus, the rest of the phones in the room came to life with another incoming message.

 **RED ALERT: White male, long brown hair, striped sweater, brown pants. Armed with hunting knife. Seen outside Styrax Stadium.**

Without further instruction the class flew into frenzy as students crowded together in the back of the room, all around two tall boys with small yellow and brown pokémon. Tempest moved to leave her seat, grabbing a bag from the floor as she moved to the back of the room.

"It's him," Wallace said before he wet his lips. "Chara, it's him." Wallace turned slowly in his seat and watched the remaining students vanishing from the classroom behind glints of yellow lights.

Wallace saw something, someone, move against the adjacent wall, just out of eyesight when something akin to an explosion rocked the building, the lights secured in the ceiling flickered off for a brief second before they shut off and emergency lights came to life. Flares of white and yellow lights flashed across Wallace's face as he fidgeted, unable to move from his seat or remain completely still.

The person against the wall began to panic, Wallace listened to them cry out and watched their form start pacing along the sides of the room.

Xan rushed from his seat to the side of the room and hovered over a girl who collapsed there, her hands cupped over her ears as she rocked back and forth. "Can you tell me your name?" he asked.

Wallace began to tremble, violently, to the point elgyem toppled off his shoulder. He half listened to Xan attempting to reassure the girl, but he was fried, his mind and emotions running wild with the thought that Chara had in fact returned and was closing in. All of it overloaded his mind, making it impossible to move let alone command elgyem to take him to safety.

His foot shook nervously against the floor as he watched a Xan help the girl, now sobbing, to her feet. His tense gaze followed every step the girl took before his eyes raised to find a large white bandage across her cheek. At the sight of that bandage, a telltale sign of her injury, Wallace immediately recognized the girl. "Eleanor," he wheezed.

Eleanor lifted her head, her eyes wide and her cheeks slick with tears. She opened her mouth and let out an inhuman kind of wail as she saw Wallace.

Wallace's eyes glazed over the longer he stared at Eleanor, searching across the planes of her face to find the same kind of terror he felt, only hers had bubbled easily to the surface.

Xan led Eleanor to Wallace and grabbed her hand, guiding her into placing her hand on elgyem's head. "I need both of you to get out of here, I'm fine, but you have to evacuate."

"T-Teleport," Wallace breathed as he placed a shaking hand on elgyem's side.

During his stay in the Health and Wellness Center, Wallace had come to realize elgyem didn't always have a destination in mind when he teleported, only to get away from their current place and to somewhere safe, but Wallace made it a point to deem his dorm room as a safe place for him to always teleport to.

Xan's classroom was lost under the flare of soft lights as Wallace and Eleanor were transported from the Origin Center and into his vacant bedroom. The blinds were up and from the window Wallace could see that everything about the day seemed wrong. The sun was too bright and everything was too picture perfect across the manicured landscape of the campus, and yet, a killer was loose on the university's island.

Wallace took to his bed, perching himself on the edge and the muscles in his legs instantly seized, hardening and cramping in his calves as his leg bounced up and down, a nervous tick Wallace had no control over. Across from him, Eleanor paced the length of his room, wringing her hands together and muttering incoherent sentences under her breath.

Wallace's eyes fell to his knee, jumping up and down as if loaded on a spring, and clamped his hand down on his leg when the door opened. Neo peered around the door slowly, Garret on his heels. The two of them eased the door shut before the latter took a seat on his bed.

"I figured you'd come back here." Neo said, glancing between Wallace and Eleanor, his eyes staying on the latter. "Are you two okay?"

"Terrified," Eleanor said, her voice shaky, and her tone implying annoyance at the pointless nature of Neo's question.

Wallace saw a wounded look flash across Neo's face before he retreated to one of the desk chairs.

"I'm sorry," Eleanor whimpered as she cupped her face. "I just can't handle this. I can't handle the idea that he's back. He attacked me, personally, and I – I've never been more scared." The upperclassmen kept pacing, sticking to a straight path before Garret's bed. "I feel like I can't breathe."

"T-That's natural," Garret said.

"He's right. It's completely fine for you to be scared." Neo stood and approached Eleanor and slowly placed his hands on her shoulders, stopping her gait and squaring their shoulders. "We're not going to let him get near you, either of you."

"I-I'm sure public safety is going to catch him," Garret added, sounding just as shaky as Eleanor did.

"They couldn't catch him last time," Eleanor reminded as she shifted uneasily in Neo's grasp. "He made it to campus unnoticed, this is what he does."

"But the alert went out right away," Neo said, unwavering in his attempts to console her.

Wallace worked his neck around in a circle, attempting to block out the reassuring comments that kept soaring from Neo and Garret, and all of Eleanor's cries, until it became too much. "Why don't you just let your arcanine out again?" Wallace lowered his head and rubbed at the back of his neck. "It'll kill him and all our problems will be solved."

When he looked back up, clutching at the muscles below his neck, Wallace found all eyes gaping at him. The tears Eleanor had shed in the classroom were back, making her eyes glassy before they spilled over her eyes.

"Why would you say that, Wallace, you make it sound like it was on purpose?" Neo said, his face scrunching up as if the sight of Wallace disgusted him.

"You weren't there," Wallace reminded. "You just know what your facts and databases tell you." Wallace sat up and folded his leg under him on the bed to keep it from shaking.

"What is wrong with you?" Neo asked softly.

"What's wrong with you?" Wallace quipped.

Neo looked wounded as he looked to Garret and Eleanor, perhaps for backup, before he looked to Wallace, turning to face him fully. "I'm trying to help, trying to keep everyone calm and rationalize things."

"Why don't you do it somewhere else?" Wallace asked before he hung his head and pinched at the bridge of his nose. "You can't apply rational thought to a murderer. Nothing about this is rational, or calm. He's out there and he wants to kill us!"

"Ellie, why don't we go to the lounge." Neo ushered Eleanor towards the door, keeping his eyes over his shoulders and on Wallace the whole time until they were out of the door.

"W-Wallace, he just wants to help you," Garret said, his voice like the wind brushing through the room.

"No," Wallace said. "He wants to help her, because he likes her. He doesn't care about me, he doesn't get it."

"He likes you too, you're his friend, we're all friends," Garret said. "Or at least, I think we are... But you said it takes time to become friends."

Wallace shook his head and pressed his knuckles into his temples as he began rocking back and forth on the edge of his bed. As he ground the points of his knuckles into his head, Wallace rewound the choices he'd made recently, every decision that led him to his current set of circumstances. Wallace ran through the idea of how if he'd done one thing differently, Andrew would still be alive. He never would have met Arlette, she never would have been arrested, he never would have set foot on campus, or in the safari, and never would have become the target for a murderer. It was the first time Wallace had longed for his old life – the opulence of his sheets, his immaculate townhouse that served as the backdrop for his life as an heir.

Across the room, Garret was still rattling off meek sentences about grief and trying to bring their group of friends closer together, but every word he spoke made Wallace press harder into his temples.

"I know public safety will catch him this time, for sure," Garret said as he shifted on his bed and then stood. "They've been looking for him for days, I – I don't think they'll let him get away."

Wallace peered up to find Garret had stopped just a few feet from him. "I guess," he groaned.

"That must be why this lockdown is still going on. I hope he didn't attack anyone on his way across campus. Why do you think people act like that, Wallace?" Garret asked.

"I don't know, Garret." Wallace shook his head and clenched his fists to the point he thought his nails might pierce his palms.

"Wallace, what do you think Chara was doing at the mansion? Sorry, I know you probably don't want to talk about it, but I'm worried too and I heard that talking these things out can help with it. Wallace? I looked up a lot about anxiety and grief after the safari zone, to help."

Wallace's foot slipped out from under him and he slammed both his feet onto the tile floor as he shot up, coming face to face with Garret. In an instant his hands were coiled into the fabric of Garret's shirt and he had the boy forced against the wall.

Screaming. Both of them were screaming for vastly different reasons as Wallace pressed into Garret, his fists sinking into the soft flesh of Garret's chest. "Shut up," Wallace said plainly, his voice scratchy and dry. "Shut up, Garret, okay? Shut up! Just stop talking, shut up!"

"Wa – "

"No! Shut up!" Wallace twisted his fists in Garret's shirt and saliva sprayed from his mouth, dotting Garret's face. "Just shut up!" With a jerk, Wallace pulled Garret from the wall and then threw him back, the front of his shirt twisted and crumbled.

A sound, Garret's head striking the brick wall, resonated within Wallace's mind and took him back to that moment of collision when Andrew hit the floor, when Dirk hit the staircase. Tears filled Garret's eyes as he cupped the back of his head and fell to the ground in a heap.

Wallace pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes as he backed away, wobbling on unsteady legs. "It wasn't supposed to be like this," he rasped. As he dropped his hands he watched Garret check his hands and then slowly crawl across the floor away from Wallace. "I can't do this, this is supposed to be easy." Wallace's voice went high and airy as he struggled to take in solid breaths of air.

Shutting his eyes, Wallace squeezed tears from his eyes and hunched over as his chest began to rapidly rise and fall, spastically contracting with the odd intakes of air. "I'm sorry," he cried as he sank to his knees in the middle of the floor, his hands clenching into fists again. "It should have been me. I don't do anything, but make everything worse."

"W-Wallace?" Garret said in a hushed voice from the gap of space between his bed and desk. "Y-You're bleeding."

Shaking, Wallace turned his hands over, the center of his palms were lined with small slivers of puncture wounds and small pools of blood were gathered on his skin, some of it already dried. Wallace touched at his face gingerly, he could feel small patches of skin where he'd touched his face and it dried around his eyes, the scent of blood and copper heavy in the air.

The door to the room opened again, not quietly as Neo had done before, this time with urgency. Wallace's eyes darted to the side and found Don standing there with a young looking boy with too blond hair.

"Oh," Don breathed, his face flushed. "Atropa, use grass whistle."

Wallace's eyes fell to Don's legs where his roserade emerged from the hall, petals pressed to its lips already as a high pitched whine filled the room. "No, stop," Wallace pleaded as he struggled to stand. The sound of roserade's whistle pierced through the chaos in his head and seemed to throw him off balance. His legs gave out as soon as he got to his feet and he dropped again. There was movement across the room before he fell into a pair of arms.

As the room darkened and sounds slurred, Wallace drifted into the smell of flowers.

* * *

End of Chapter Twelve

* * *

 ** _AN:_** New character alert! This chapter we've got: **Aloysius Sutcliffe** by **The Pocketwatch Ripper** , **Shalom Till** by **snowwolf12132** , **Christopher** by **Farla** , and **Xanthel Ishimaru** by **Cuervo 'Dark Servant' Wraith.**

 **Question of the Chapter #11:** Do you think Wallace's breakdown/outburst will force the truth out of him, or will he work harder to keep it together?


	13. Lilys and Lies

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirteen – Lilys and Lies**

 _Only those who will risk going too far  
_ _can possibly find out how far one can go._ _\- T.S. Elio_ _t_

* * *

 _Gasping, Wallace felt his grip loosening, his small hands, frigid and slick with ice water, slipped free, and then his world tilted. Frantic, he made one last grab for the bank – heard Andrew shout again – but didn't make it in time._

 _He crashed into the water on his back, the impact and shock of the water hammering the air from his lungs with a vicious splash. His limbs, waving spastically and cutting through the surface, burned from the cold water. The cries from the shore were lost under the roar of water as the river closed in overhead. His vision flashed white as his head struck something, a jagged rock. The jolt forced his mouth open to cry and a laggard jet of frothy white bubbles fled from his mouth, lost among the foam around him. His throat seized, contracting as water flooded his throat before his lungs were set ablaze, burning for oxygen._

 _The white and crystal blue water turned into a searing red. Disoriented, a victim to the current, Wallace whirled, spiraling and panicking before he reached out for a glimmer across what he thought might be the surface. He kicked his legs desperately, the fabrics across his body restricting his movements as water filled his boots and greedily clung to his clothes._

 _For a brief moment, Wallace floundered through the surface, the bite of wind like a slap across the face. Wallace's head snapped back, an instinct to keep his face above the water, as he sucked in air through a single and shrieking gasp. His vision cleared, the white cloud sky coming through clear to him before the river pushed him around, swinging him around towards a tumble of rocks that obstructed part of the river._

 _Wallace kicked, his boots scraping haplessly against the riverbed, in an attempt to avoid the rocks, but the current pushed him without regard and slammed him into the stones. His right side struck the rocks, a thundering blow that exploded from his right shoulder and sent needle prick shocks down to his fingertips._

 _Pressed against the rocks, still pressured by the current, but no longer being forced downstream, Wallace was able to gain his footing and could see Andrew on the shore, shrieking. He saw another body too, one in the water with him, thrashing wildly down the river, coming straight for him._

* * *

Wallace thrashed at the feeling of something heavy and damp being dragged across his forehead and down the sides of his face. He kicked, his legs captured by fabric and unable to break free. His eyes felt glued shut and his head stuffed with cotton as a pair of hands landed on his arm, startling him. Thrashing, Wallace twisted and turned in bed, his dream colliding with reality as the hands on his arm moved to his shoulder to press him onto the bed.

Balling his fists, Wallace swung. His left had struck something solid and then the hands were gone. Gaining purchase against smooth fabric beneath him, Wallace scurried up into a crouching position on what he imagined was his bed. He rubbed at his eyes, wiping away the discharge that kept his eyes shut, and blinking as he took in his dim surroundings.

His room was dark, only a glow from the mirror above the dressers against the far wall gave light to the room. Wallace scanned the room as the shadows cast across the floor molded together and found that he wasn't alone.

Wallace saw the light from the mirror fall across the planes of a round face and short and dark glossy back hair before his company moved closer to the bed. Wallace let out a withheld breath as Don's face came into view, hand pressed firmly to his cheek.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Don held up his other hand, a gesture that he meant no harm, and in it Wallace saw a damp cloth. Following Wallace's eyes, Don looked to the cloth and unfolded it, refolding it in his lap. "I was trying to get the blood off your face."

Wallace felt his pulse thundering through every vein as he touched his face, slick with water and the faint scent of copper still lingered on his skin. He let his legs slide out from under him as he sank down onto his bed, grasping at the unfamiliar feeling of fabric around him. Between his time in the safari, his rebuff with Garret, and seeing Andrew's mom, he hadn't had time to unpack the bedding he'd brought from the bookstore, but the dark blue plaid bed set he'd bought were fitted across his mattress and a heavy looking duvet had been knocked to the floor. Two large plush pillows, stuffed inside matching cases were stacked at the head of his bed.

As if he was able to read his thoughts, Don scooted closer, the wooden chair under him scraping against the tile, as he tugged at the fitted sheet on the bed. "I made your bed. I didn't know how long you would be asleep, but I wanted you to be comfortable. I took care of your hands too."

Wallace's forehead corrugated as he turned his hands over and ran his fingers over a thick gauze wrapping around his hands, holding pads of cotton to the center of his palms. "Thhh," Wallace wheezed, his throat sore and dry, as if he'd swallowed a mouthful of powder.

Don jolted in his seat before he pulled a water bottle from the desk along with Wallace's glasses. He twisted the top off the bottle and held both items out to Wallace. "Here, I figured you'd be thirsty."

Wallace grabbed his glasses and slid them onto his face and swallowed uneasily as he grabbed the water, his eyes never leaving Don's face. He sipped slowly, it was warm and went down easily, soothing the scratchy walls of his throat and clearing the gummy feeling from his mouth. "Thank you," he said, his voice shallow and grave. Unsure of what to say, Wallace kept the bottle of water to his mouth, pouring a little bit of water in at a time.

"It's nothing. I used to patch up my brother." Don looked to his lap and kept refolding the cloth, his hands shaking slightly. "I'm sorry about putting you to sleep, I – I just panicked," he said as he looked up, locking eyes with Wallace. "I was taking my brother back to his room and I heard loud sounds and shouting, and then I saw you and all that blood." Don's head tipped down and he shook his head, as if unable to shake the image of what he walked into from his head. "I don't know."

"What time is it?" Wallace asked.

"Around eight," Don said. "The lockdown ended a few hours ago."

Wallace's head snapped up at that, as if the thought of Chara on campus kicked him in the back of the head. "Did they?"

Don bit at his lip and shook his head. "They said he escaped back into the bay."

Wallace let out a long breath and squeezed the water bottle. "You were taking Nat back to his room?" he asked, flashing back to what Don had said.

"Uh, no, it was my little brother." Don looked back up to Wallace before he averted his eyes.

Wallace followed Don's gaze to the end of his bed and found someone standing there, practically pressing themselves against the window. A throb of memory reminded Wallace of the boy who entered his room behind Don before he passed out. A young looking boy, his face illuminated by moonlight, with waves of white-blond hair that stopped just past the upper ridge of his ear, stood in front of Wallace's windows, swaying side to side, his arms cradled across his chest as he held elgyem like an infant.

Wallace's nostrils flared seeing elgyem. "Who are you?"

The boy turned, his eyebrows raised above a large pair of hooded eyes behind thick glasses, not any different from the ones Wallace wore. "Your elgyem was crying," he said. "I calmed him down." The boy came to the side of the bed and held elgyem out and traded him off to Wallace.

Wallace scooted back on the back and laid elgyem down onto his folded lap. "Who are you?"

"Child of the stars," the boy said softly with a knowing smile.

Don sighed, but was smiling. "This is Cosmo Freelily, my younger brother. Elgyem was upset after you fell asleep, so I asked Cosmo to help calm him down. Your spinarak was upset too, but he relaxed too." Don turned in the chair and squared his shoulders to Wallace.

Spinarak was there, draped across the back of Don's shirt, hanging in the middle of a web that hung between Don's protruding shoulder blades. Wallace let out a soft sigh of relief to see spinarak and elgyem, both okay.

Don looked back to Wallace and pressed his chin to his shoulder. "You can grab him."

Wallace scooted to the edge of his bed and tried to pry spinarak from the back of Don's shirt, but he wouldn't budge. Tentatively, Wallace placed his hand onto the center of Don's back and slowly pulled spinarak off his web, the small pokémon clicking his mandibles even in his sleep.

"He left you a present," Cosmo said.

Don turned back and laughed. "Yeah, I saw the web."

"Should I get his dad?" Cosmo asked as he came to Don's side.

The bottom of Wallace's stomach fell out at the mention of his father. "My dad?"

Don's face lit up. "I met your dad, he showed up while you were sleeping. He said he'd wait until you woke up. Cosmo, can you go grab him?"

Cosmo bobbed his head before he spun on his heels and headed to the door. Don stood from his seat and scooted the chair back into its place under the desk. He wandered the room before he stopped in front of the mirror to admire the web design across his back, Wallace curled up on the corner of his bed, cradling elgyem and spinarak in his lap, heart pounding and mind racing of what his father could be doing here.

Cosmo returned a few minutes later, followed by not Arlan, but Izumi, who entered the room like he was there to accept an award, wide strides and a winning smile, as if the award was for the best Arlan Pearce impersonator. The rumbling of Wallace's stomach quelled as Izumi shut the door behind him and regarded him with a knowing grin.

"Wally!" Izumi boomed, louder than necessary as he crossed the room and engaged him in an awkward and improvised hug. "Thanks for letting me see him, boys," Izumi said as he turned to the Freelily brothers. "If you don't mind."

Don nodded as he ushered Cosmo by the shoulder to the door. "We'll leave you alone," Don said as they left. As Don closed the door, Wallace was sure he saw something, a look of concern, or something more, cross Don's face.

Izumi waited for a breath after they left before he crossed the room and locked the door. "If what I heard is true, it's safe to assume no one is going to come knocking? Or better yet, barging in, like your roommate for example?"

Wallace sucked in a deep breath as he looked to his hands and thought about them twisted into Garret's shirt. After blowing Garret off and then attacking him, Wallace couldn't imagine Garret ever wanting to talk to him again, let alone sharing a living space with him. For a moment, while Izumi checked out the window, acting paranoid, Wallace considered a scenario where Garret moved in with Neo and the mute Christopher became his roommate.

"I gotta say kid, you sure know how to keep life interesting," Izumi said as he rounded the bed and pulled the wooden chair back out. "I show up and see you lying comatose with blood all over the place, I never took you as one for theatrics."

Wallace's eyes fell upon the cloth Don had been using, rust colored with his blood, and then to Izumi, who looked a bit older since their last meeting. His long dark hair was pulled back and brushed behind his ears and he was dressed in a long shirt with dark jeans. He didn't look like his father, but certainly he would pass as someone's parent when seen on campus. "Why are you here?" Wallace asked.

"Do you have a laptop?" Izumi asked as he pulled something, a flash drive, from his pocket.

Wallace nodded towards his desk and Izumi started pulling open drawers before he grabbed Wallace's laptop out and plugged the drive in. Wallace watched Izumi swirled his fingers across the trackpad before he turned the laptop to face him, black and white footage playing in the media player.

"What we have here is the footage of you visiting the Camphrier Pokémon Center on a few separate occasions," Izumi said.

Wallace scooted closer and narrowed his eyes, watching the video play. From the view on the screen, the camera seemed to be stationed in the corner of the room, near the entrance, enabling it to get a view of both the main counter, as well as the shop and sitting area. Wallace watched countless trainers entered and exited during the sped up video, but his head throbbed when he spotted himself moving uneasily around the center. It wasn't a grand entrance and nothing he did would stand out to anyone, unless they were specifically looking for him, but he recognized himself instantly.

"Now," Izumi tapped a few buttons on the screen and Wallace watched as the footage changed, the view of the Center was the same, but as the video played he kept waiting for himself to enter, though it never came. "This is the footage we've replaced into the Camphrier security system. So it seems like your problem is solved."

Wallace sighed and sat back on his bed, still watching the footage, expecting to see something to give him pause, but the footage played without a single trace of him on it. "Thank you," he said softly. "I mean it, thank you."

Izumi pursed his lips and nodded. "Now the matter of my fee."

Wallace reached into his pocket and pulled out his class schedule along with his trainer ID as Izumi pulled a small card reading device from his pocket. Wallace waited as Izumi entered their agreed upon amount before he swiped and waited for the approval.

"Wonderful," Izumi said as he gazed over the card reader. "As always your business is appreciated. So, while I'm here, is there anything else you need, or something you want to tell me?"

Wallace pursed his lips and looked down to elgyem, shaking his head. "No, just the footage, that's all I needed."

Izumi nodded and smiled. "Well, before I go, in the interest of keeping your ass out of boiling water, let me impart some of my findings on you. I have to admit my curiosity got the best of me when you called again, what would the police be looking for on the security footage and why would it matter if you were on it? So I asked around, cashed in a few favors, and found out the police have a suspect for the disappearance of Andrew Gates. A young girl who is believed to have been dating Andrew around the time he vanished, Arlette Bellerose. A little bit more digging and I find out they're looking to track Andrew's PC log-ins with his last known locations and combine that with whatever they can pump out of Arlette."

Wallace found Izumi's narrowed eyes, but remained silent, stroking a pattern on elgyem's head.

"So, me being the forward thinking business man that I am, start connecting the dots." Izumi raised his pointer fingers in the air and tapped them together. "Son of Arlan Pearce comes to me, days after Andrew Gates, son of Charles Gates, business partner to Arlan Pearce, goes missing and needs a new identity. Shortly after that, Andrew's girlfriend is brought in to shed some light on this whole mess. This whole time everyone is being put through the ringer. Arlan is being interviewed, Charles is being interviewed, everyone except Wallace Pearce, who I have come to find out is the best friend of the missing Andrew. One thing leads me to another, which brings me to the conclusion that you have something to do with Andrew's disappearance. However, like most people know, after the first 48 the odds of a missing person being just missing becomes extremely slim, and the odds of finding a body, a dead body, have increased. In the interest of keeping this business relationship as stress-free as possible, this is a question I'll only ask you once. Did you kill Andrew Gates?"

Wallace clenched his jaw, his teeth grinding against one another as the muscles in his jaw tightened. His hands throbbed with the wounds on his palm as he clenched his fists.

Izumi's head tipped down, his slitted eyes opening slightly as he noted Wallace's tense posture. "Take it easy, killer. I'm not here to turn you in, after all there seems to be no evidence. Plus, I was the one who helped you escape and evade police, the blowup from this wounds me just as badly as it does you. The reason I'm putting it out there is because now I'm involved, and I need to know what I need to do to keep us both safe."

"You've already done it," Wallace murmured.

"You're right, I have," Izumi said as he stood and retracted the flash drive from Wallace's laptop. He slipped the drive back into his pocket and glared down at Wallace. "I don't think I'd be asking for too much here to get a thank you. In my mind, the police check the footage, after being led there by Arlette's questioning, see nothing of interest on it, you're off the hook, and the investigation is back to the drawing board. But I'm hung up on one thing, Miss. Bellerose, have you thought about how you're getting her out of there?"

"No, I was just think that the police can't find me on the tape, I hadn't really thought about Arlette," Wallace said, wringing his hands together.

"I'm all for bending and breaking when it comes to the law, but having someone framed for my crimes is a little much," Izumi said.

"I didn't frame anyone," Wallace snapped. "The police came to their own conclusion about her, I didn't even know she knew Andrew until they were walking her out in cuffs."

"Fine," Izumi said, throwing his hands up in surrender. "But then why not try and help her? If she's a connection to Andrew, why not get her out of there? You can hire a real lawyer and get the entire mess taken care of instantly, because who knows what else she might spill. I'm all for looking out for the home team, Wally, but only being concerned with helping yourself doesn't bode well for your future. There's a fine line between being not good and being bad, Wallace. You can cross that line as much as you want, just as long as you don't forget where it's at."

"Are we done here?" Wallace asked, casting his eyes off to the side of the room, his patience wearing thin.

"Yeah, I guess," Izumi said as he wandered towards the door, but paused before he reached for the handle. "Oh, found a little something outside your door when I arrived earlier." Izumi dug into his pants pocket and pulled out a folded up slip of paper that he tossed towards Wallace. "Didn't seem like the type of thing you would want anyone to see."

The paper fell onto the floor before Wallace's bed. Wallace slid his leg off the bed and nudged at the note with his foot, but made no effort to retrieve it.

"Not interested?" Izumi asked with a shrug. "Well, it wasn't a reminder to study for your biology exam, I'll just put it like that. A prank I hope, otherwise it seems like you're making the wrong kind of friends."

Wallace turned his eyes down to the floor, staring at the note as Izumi left. It wasn't until he heard the man's footfalls quiet into null down the hall that he slid off his bed and grabbed the paper. Unfolding it slowly, Wallace saw the bold words of the note spread out before him.

 **LIFE WILL BE NO FUN**

 **WHEN IT TURNS OUT**

 **YOU CAN TRUST NO ONE**

Wallace's hands, already cold and numb, quivered as he let the note fall from his fingers. Wallace pressed a fist to his mouth, to block a scream that clawed its way up his throat. The harder he pressed into his teeth, the more he started to shake as waves of anxiety spread from his spine in the form of bumps on his skin and biting chill, that only added to his tremors.

Wallace snatched the note off the floor and crumbled it up and then unfolded it again, ripping and tearing it into odd shaped polygons that he dumped into a small trashcan beside Garret's bed. He took to pacing the room in silent strides before he moved towards one of the stacks of boxes from his bookstore delivery. Using his hands, Wallace attacked the boxes, yanking and tearing at the taped ends, ripping cardboard apart with unnecessary force.

As the contents of his order started to spill out, all contained in small bags held in one larger bag for each box, Wallace looked around his scarcely decorated room before he ripped into plastic and began to fill his hands with the contents of his order.

Wallace stacked his textbooks, in an obsession compulsive way, on his desk in an order that saw the book set up according to class and size. He stuffed baggies of Poké Balls away in the drawers of his desk, in order of catch rate, which he spent considerable time researching. The university themed apparel he purchased, along with hangers, he stowed away in his closet, arranging them by color and season. He stuffed trainer gear and tools down into the bottom of his closet and arranged medicine on the top shelf before displaying toiletries along his dresser, beside Garret's things.

After hours passed, Wallace had began breaking down the boxes, in a less aggressive way that he had opened them, until they all lie flat, stacked on his floor, and the plastic was all balled up together.

Unable to sit still, Wallace crawled beneath his bed, careful not to wake his sleeping pokémon, where he found his phone. Plugging it in, he waited for the battery to charge enough before turning it on and being flooded with an influx of missed messages, emails, and calls. A number of people from Lumiose had contacted him since he'd reached the university, including Jason who had guided him through the Badlands. His father and Charles had called several times as well as Andrew's mom.

Without fear of using his phone due to Izumi having unlisted his number last week, Wallace sat at his desk and dialed in his father's number, his anxiety reaching its boiling point.

"Hello, this is Arlan."

An odd and nauseating sense of nostalgia washed over Wallace hearing his father's voice again. When just a handful of hours ago he was longing for his old life, one that was complex and sensitive, living atop an already fractured glass pedestal that was his father's expectation, that feeling seemed to fade after waking up. He didn't want that life, or any of the problems that had stemmed from it any longer. His longing for the luxury of the Pearce had somehow changed, wiped and smeared away as Don had cleaned off his blood, into a yearning for the mud, for a life that consisted of exams and classes, one in which he could bury himself into work and ignore the tragedies that surrounded him.

"Wallace?" Arlan asked, sounding annoyed.

Wallace squeezed his eyes shut and jammed his phone into his temple. "Yeah," he breathed, his voice like a surrender.

"Why are you calling?" Arlan asked, colorlessly.

"I don't know," Wallace said, sounding half his age, like a child who'd been caught writing in marker over the walls of the house, but couldn't pinpoint a reason for doing it. Wallace looked towards the end of Garret's desk, where the trashcan sat below on the floor. Despite being torn into confetti-sized pieces, the note and its foreboding message still lingered around him. "I'm in trouble and I – I don't know what to do." Wallace listened to the sound in the background, voices and music, fading as Arlan sighed into the line.

"Are you asking for my help?" he asked.

Wallace bunched up his shoulders and stared ahead at the white bricks on his room, as if the conversation were contained within his room and not long distance. "I don't know."

"You don't know," Arlan said. "I'll tell you what I know. I know you must be delirious to think I'd ever help you again, after that stunt you pulled!"

Wallace gasped, his throat cinching shut, his father's sharp and biting tone cutting into him. "S-Stunt?"

"Yes, stunt," Arlan said in a harsh whisper, his voice like air squeezing out of a balloon. "I send you to put Charles' mind at ease, but you spend the entire day out and the next day you're gone. I had to find out from Jason you headed to Coumarine. To visit a friend?" Arlan said, his voice rising with inflection. "I told you, you don't have any friends, everyone knows that, and it's pathetic that you keep using that as an excuse and now for your escape."

Wallace ran his hand across the top of his desk, stopping as he came across a splintered dent in the wood. "It's not an escape unless you have something you're running from," Wallace said quietly, fiddling with edge of the dent, picking at the loose wood bits. "And I'm betting I did have a reason to run, judging by how angry you are."

"What exactly are you implying?" Arlan asked.

Wallace listened to Arlan shuffling around and a difference in the background noise, as if he has relocated to a quieter area to continue their conversation. "That whatever is going on between you and Charles doesn't add up with what you and I know. Charles thinks Andrew left Kalos because that's what you told him. But when I went to their house, the day I came back, all of Andrew's gear was still in his room, his entire team was there. What kind of trainer leaves behind his team when he travels?" Wallace shut his eyes and could see Andrew's room, looking as lived in as any other room, as if Andrew would return any minute, pick up, and take off again. But his thoughts soon turned into morbid ones of Andrew's team, still resting within their Poké Balls, never to see their trainer again.

"Andrew isn't any kind of trainer anymore, thanks to you!" Arlan barked, his voice like tires rolling over gravel. "And it doesn't matter what I told Charles, he believed it and everything I've done has been to keep suspicion off of you, don't forget that. Don't forget that, not for one second, you ungrateful brat."

"I won't," Wallace said as he strained to keep his voice steady and strong, despite the tremors that were racking his body again. "But maybe Charles isn't believing it. I don't know, I don't care, but that's why I left. Because when whatever house of lies you've built comes crumbling down, I won't be trapped inside. I'll take care of myself."

"With my money," Arlan quipped. "For someone who never took to the fortune he was born into you've sure made use of it this past week. I noticed you took some from my safe. I hope it's serving you well."

Wallace dug his nail under an edge of splintered wood and with a hard pull, ripped out a chunk of polished wood from the desk. "You'll make more, it doesn't it matter."

Arlan laughed into the line, a genuine laugh that turned Wallace's blood to slush. "You're right, it doesn't matter, not the money at least, but keep in mind the only reason I didn't turn you in is because you're my son. As much as I wish you weren't. It's a factor that has chained me to responsibility from the day we decided to bring you into the public eye. Everything you did, or would ever do, would be reflected back on me and I can't tell you how irritating that is. To know everything I worked for could be gone because of someone else's actions. And that's exactly what happened the night you pushed your best friend down the stairs. But I can't have you punished for Andrew's death, especially not now, but if you keep acting like I'm the criminal here things might not stay in your favor for much longer."

The phone slipped from Wallace's hands and struck the desk with a loud clatter. Wallace struggled to calm his breathing as he rubbed the bone in the palms of his hands together. "I didn't kill him," Wallace said aloud, hanging his head above the phone.

"What was that?" Arlan asked, his voice faint.

Wallace sucked in a deep breath before he grabbed the phone and held it precariously to his ear. "I think things will always be in my favor. Every day that goes by without you turning me in you only risk hurting yourself for the coverup. And the day the police knock on my door, your name will be the first and only thing I say," Wallace said, his voice trembling in rhythm with the rest of his body.

"You'd really sell me out? Just to avoid the punishment of your crime?" Arlan asked. "Did I teach you that? To avoid the truth and to blame others?"

"You started this!" Wallace barked, shooting up from this desk. "You told me I couldn't be there when the police arrived!"

"Because I know it was an accident! Because I knew you couldn't handle that, you didn't deserve it! Going through the system, being questioned and found guilty for his death! You weren't strong enough, I knew that. But that was before you ran away and started making decisions on your own!" Arlan's voice was rising and falling along sharp whispers, as if he were close to blowing up, but still trying to remain quiet. "Before you started acting like something other than the spoiled and sheltered brat you've always been, the one who breaks down the first time something bad happens. But if you think you're stronger now, then I'll call the police right now."

Wallace pressed the phone to his cheek as he gripped the sides of his head, his nails digging into his scalp. Pain, the mixture of fear and angry, swelled in his head. A lightweight feeling filled his head and for an instant Wallace felt weightless before the sound of gravel, heavy footsteps down a loose stone driveway, filled his ears. His vision sheeted first black and then white as he stumbled away from the desk and ended up facing the mirror. "I don't deserve any of this," he whined, his phone burning the flesh on his cheek.

"Wallace," Arlan said, his tone calmer than before. "I want this all to blow over, it's reflecting bad on the company and Charles. Oh, Andrew's mother came to me, has she reached out to you?"

"No," Wallace said immediately, the pain fading from his mind. "I didn't even know she was back."

"Right."

Wallace pursed his lips. He couldn't tell, by his father's curt reply, if he bought his lie or not. "What if I told you I had a way to make some of this go away?" he asked, feeling some relief flood his body. He wiped at beads of cold sweat that lingered near his brow, searching his face in the mirror for something.

"I'd tell you that you're a little too late," Arlan said followed by a surpassed laugh. "Charles is very much in the loop and from what I hear they've got Andrew's girlfriend in for questioning. Only a matter of time before they tells them something they want to hear and the shit storm worsens."

"Her name is Arlette, and she knows nothing." Wallace pulled ran his hand over his hair, in just the handful of days since he cut it, his hair already seemed to be growing back. "Nothing to lead them in any real direction. But I need her out of there, away from the police."

"Why do you care? Did you two share her or something?" Arlan asked.

"No!" Wallace protested. "She's no one," Wallace said, feeling a pang of guilt for saying it aloud. "I just think it's better if they stop looking at her."

"And who are they supposed to be looking at instead?" Arlan asked. "Investigations just don't stop, they shift, from suspect to suspect. And if it's not this girl, who's next?"

"I'll handle that, just get her out."

"How do you propose I do that?"

Wallace smiled and angled his thumb over the END CALL button. "Just do what you do best, throw money at the problem," Wallace said before he mashed down the button and watched his screen fade as the call ended. As the time log of his call flashed across his screen Wallace propped himself against the dresser for support, his chest rising and falling awkwardly against the wood as he tried to keep it together, his bravado slipping away.

Shifting back up, Wallace dialed in another number and waited impatiently for the call to go through. He started to pace again, taking the length of his room in strides before the line picked up. "I need your help," Wallace said before they could even speak, stopping in front of his mirror, eyeing himself again.

* * *

After ending his second tense and demanding phone call for the night, Wallace gathered his things and showered. Having skipped showering that morning, and the feeling he still had smeared blood on his face, warranted Wallace a long shower.

Once the hot water turned his flesh numb and puckered the tip of his fingers, Wallace shut off the water, slipped on a pair of shorts and wrapped a towel around him. In the front of the bathroom Wallace spent a while observing himself in the mirrors above the counter of sinks. On the thin side before leaving home, he'd definitely lost more weight, judging by how far he cinched the towel around his stomach.

Turning, Wallace looked down his back at the scars from Chara's magical leaf attack, all in varying stages of healing. Some had already begun to scab over, while others remained an angry pink.

Once he was done, Wallace swung the bathroom door open and nearly slipped on the tile outside. Standing around his door were Don and his older brother, Nat, the former in the middle of rapping against his door when he appeared in the hall.

Don pulled away from the door at the sound of the bathroom door smacking shut. "Oh, you're okay," Don said softly, his eyes meeting Wallace's face for just a second before they trailed down.

"Bella, use howl, 'cause it's a boy in a towel," Nat teased before he pinched his brother in the shoulder. "I guess you don't need my help anymore."

"What?" Wallace asked as he crossed his arms over his chest in a more protective than defensive manner.

"Bella was worried about ya, for some reason," Nat as he moved on from pinching Don to digging his ear. "He called me to break down your door if you didn't answer. Anyway, I'm out. I had to walk all the way to the freshman dorm and I'm not leaving without giving someone a wedgie."

Wallace watched Nat walk with a lazy swagger down the hall and then turn the corner at the same time as another student. Upon crossing paths, Nat jerked himself forward, as if to attack the student, who yelped in surprise and dropped an armful of books on the floor.

"Is everything okay?" Wallace asked to Don as he watched the student scurry across the floor, after Nat left, to gather their books.

"I just wanted to check back in on you, make sure you were okay," Don said as he grabbed his elbow and held his arm to his side, a plastic bag dangling at his side. "I was getting anxious. I took Cosmo back to his room, but he left to go stargazing, so I thought I'd come see if you were doing alright. You didn't answer your door."

"I was in the shower," Wallace said, despite that being obvious.

"Yeah, I can see, I noticed, I mean – Yeah." Don's fidgeting only seemed to worsen as he looked towards the floor and began kicking at the tile.

"Do you want to come in?" Wallace asked warily as he pulled his key from among his shower supplies and unlocked his door. He stepped inside and held the door open for Don who turned in the hall, but made no motion to come inside.

"No, that's okay, don't you need to change?" Don asked.

"Oh." Wallace watched Don's eyes flick up and his gaze wrap around his waist like measuring tape. Quickly, Wallace undid the knot and pulled the towel away and used it to wipe at a few beads of water running down his neck. "I just need a shirt."

Don bobbed his head awkwardly before he took an exaggerated step inside, seemingly relieved that Wallace had a pair of shorts on.

Wallace balled the towel up and tossed it into the corner on his side of the room before he grabbed the first shirt his hand reached in his closet and threw it on. An oversized black shirt with a large plain font letter R in the center hung loosely off his shoulders.

"Should I prepare for trouble?" Don asked, his lips curled into a smile as he observed Wallace's shirt.

Wallace pulled at the ends of his top, glancing down at it, before he looked back up to Don, whose smile was widening. "Huh?"

"It's a thing, like a catchphrase or something, never mind," Don said followed by a large sigh to fill the silence. He looked down to his feet again and seemed to notice the bag he was holding. "Oh yeah, I brought food, for everyone," he said.

Wallace looked back to the center of his bed where elgyem and spinarak were still resting before he held a hand to his stomach. "Thanks."

Don looked around the room before he crossed his legs and fell into a spot on the floor. He undid a knot in the plastic bag and started pulling out styrofoam boxes, the same kind Garret brought him after he passed out. Wallace frowned as he recognized a pattern before he listened to Don gasp.

"I didn't get anything to drink!" Don said as he rummaged around in the empty bag, as if expecting cans of pop to materialize in it.

"Don't worry, I'll go to the vending machine," Wallace said as he grabbed his ID from the dresser and darted out.

* * *

When he stepped beside inside, elgyem noticed him first. He clambered up the pillows on Wallace's bed and after a flash of light buried himself into Wallace's chest. Wallace wrapped the pokémon in a hug, listening to him emit soft mechanical beeping sounds as he crossed the room. "I'm glad you're okay," he said as he eased down onto a spot opposite Don who had two styrofoam boxes open, salads overflowing both containers.

Spinarak came skittering off the bed next, snapping at Don before it scaled Wallace's leg and perched itself on his knee.

"Looks great," Wallace said as he placed two bottles of water between them and pulled one of the boxes closer. Mounds of lettuce were topped with a light sauce and a medley of berries, none of which Wallace could identify. It didn't look great at all, but any complaints he had drowned in his mouth after he caught a whiff of the sweet and citrus smells of the berries. "What is it?"

"Summer salad," Don said, through a mouthful of food. "I made berry salads for your pokémon." Don flipped the lid on a third styrofoam box to reveal it filled with berries as well, all chopped into bite sized chunks.

Elgyem and spinarak wasted no time in ditching Wallace for the box of the food. As Wallace stabbed into his salad, guiltily, he couldn't recall the last time he fed himself or his team. "Have you seen the others?" Wallace asked, his eyes still on his pokémon, his fork stabbed into the bottom of the box.

"Hm?" Don asked, again his mouth full and this time with a sliver of lettuce hanging from his cheek.

"Neo, Eleanor, and Garret," Wallace said as he gathered up a forkful of berries. "Have you seen them?"

"I passed Neo and Ellie on the way down the hall, I think he said she was taking her to the lounge. She seemed shaken up," Don said. "But which one was Garret again?"

Wallace shook his head as he poured the berries from his fork and took to stabbing the salad again. "You're close aren't you? With Eleanor."

Don nodded, chewing thoroughly. "I talked to her earlier, she said you were in class together when the alert went out, thanks for getting her out of there."

"It was all elgyem," Wallace said proudly.

"Still, I appreciate it," Don said.

"How long have you been dating?" Wallace asked, finally able to focus long enough to get a forkful of food into his mouth. Despite its appearance, the salad was the perfect mixture of crunchy lettuce, bitter berries, and sweet sauce.

Don covered his mouth as he rocked back and forth laughing. "We're not together," he said, always seeming to be caught with a mouthful. "Just friends."

"Oh, you seemed close, like a couple," Wallace said with a shrug.

"No, just friends. We met the beginning of the summer. I don't really like spending too much time at home so after my first year I took a job with the landscaping department and planted flowers and mulched all summer and when I was off I went to the safari to catalog the flowers there. That's where I met Ellie, she was doing her training to be a guide," Don said as he grabbed his bottle of water and took a long drink. Once he set the bottle down, his body jumped with a suppressed laugh, and it was then Wallace noticed the dimples that dented into Don's cheeks when he smiled. "I remember she was having trouble remembering all the buildings on campus and all the paths in the safari islands so I taught her the names of the flowers around campus so she could use them as guides."

"Flowers are your thing, huh?" Wallace asked, missing his mouth with his next bite.

Don laughed so hard he snorted as lettuce and berries spilled across Wallace's legs and onto the floor. "Yeah, my family runs a flower shop back home. It's actually become a tradition for my family to name their kids after flowers and plants."

"So what kind of flower is a Don?" Wallace asked as he flicked away lettuce off his calf.

"Well, Don is short for something else," he replied. "Something I don't like to be called."

"Oh?" Wallace asked, his interest in the conversation growing. "Is that what your brother was calling you on the intercom at the tournament? What was it, um, Bella?" Even in the dim light Wallace could see the blood rushing to Don's face as he went back to stuffing his face.

"It's Belladonna," he muttered as he stuffed forkfuls into his mouth in an attempt to disguise his name with lettuce. "I don't like it, it's feminine and my brother always teases me about it. But I named my roserade, when she was a budew, Atropa, so together we're Atropa Belladonna. It's flower that bears poison berries. I guess that family tradition applies to our pokémon too."

"Well I think that's very cool," Wallace said, honestly.

After a few minutes if silent eating Don looked to the side of the room. "Wallace." Don's eyes dropped to his box before they rose to meet Wallace's again. "I wasn't trying to be nosy, but your laptop was open and I saw something."

Wallace's heart hammered against his ribs in fear that the footage of the Camphrier Pokémon Center was still up, until he remembered Izumi took the footage with him. He set his box down and slowly stood, his legs sweating, but also feeling about as strong as goo as he walked to his desk and turned his laptop around.

After Izumi pulled the flash drive, the media player vanished and revealed the last pages Wallace had opened. His browser was up with two tabs open, one about the catch rate of Poké Balls and the other was his quiz result for Professor Till. "Oh," he breathed in relief.

"I'm guessing as far as first days go, this hasn't been a great one," Don said, still sitting crosslegged on the floor. "Everything okay?"

"Not at all." Wallace shook his head as he turned and eased into the seat at his desk. He rubbed at his eyes, not feeling the onset of tears, but to relieve a pressure stacking behind his eyes. "I have this friend, and he's traveled all over the world taking on different gyms and challenges. But there's one that I remember when he was in Hoenn. It was one of the last gyms, maybe the last, but he had to walk on these tiles and they broke after he stepped on them, but he was okay to keep going, unless he stepped on a broken tile again. And I just remember watching him box himself into a corner until he was surrounded by broken tiles. That's me. I feel like that. Like no matter what I do, if I try to fix a mistake, or move forward from it, no matter what, one move and the floor is going to open up and swallow me."

"I'm so sorry," Don said. "I can't imagine what you're going through."

"My roommate probably never wants to talk to me again, my only other friend here keeps telling me how I'm going to fail and how my pokémon aren't going to be any good in my classes, but I can't catch anything because I suck at this, at all of this." Wallace cut off, feeling another wave of panic swelling in his chest. He hunched over in the chair and sucked in a deep breath, quelling the prickling sensation of another attack.

"Is there anything I can do?" Don asked, scooting closer to him.

"Can I you teach me how to throw a Poké Ball?" Wallace asked, his tone implying it was a joke. "I think as a trainer that's a good place to start."

"Sure!" Don said as he hopped up. "I'm great at capturing pokémon."

* * *

Despite not expecting Don to seriously take him up on his offer, Wallace found himself in the basement of the ICO, practically the entire room's length between him and Don. The room was empty, but warm, and Wallace palmed sweat from his forehead before he hung his hands off his hips, watching in mild amusement as a crouched Don wedged a Poké Ball under his chin while his pulled his chin length hair into a bun.

Once his hair was secured in a small topknot, Don pulled the green bandana from his neck up to his forehead and popped back up, holding the once shiny top of the Poké Ball high in the air, his bright smile visible across the room. "Maybe you're letting it go too late," Don pulled back his arm and threw the Ball across the room. It soared, just barely missing the high ceiling, through the air at a perfect arc for Wallace to catch it in his cupped hands.

Despite knowing he sucked at throwing, Wallace wasted no time and threw it back, but once again, it curved off course. He watched as it flew over Don's head, in a dangerous path that led straight to the row of high windows against the far wall.

Where Wallace might have let it hit the window and accepted the consequences of that, Don chased after it, arms pumping as he crossed the room, following the ball's descent. As it lost momentum, Don leapt up and caught it as he fell, a move that would have made anyone else look awkward, but somehow Don made it look graceful as he landed on one foot.

"Better!" Don praised, his voice echoing through the basement, as he held the ball high, beaming before he threw it back.

Wallace sucked in a deep breath as he followed the curve of the ball's arc. After what felt like hours in the basement lounge with Don, Wallace had come to learn much about the boy he encountered in the abandoned mansion. He was a sophomore with a large extended family, a powerful throwing arm, and endurance that never seemed to wane.

Wallace backed up and followed the ball with his eyes before he attempted Don's jump. As he leapt up, the ball whizzed between the gap in his hands and in the split second of his failed capture Wallace forgot about his landing as he felt his leg bump something. He struck the arm of a leather chair and collapsed back into its seat.

As he let a heavy sigh escape his lips Wallace was thankful they were the only ones in the basement, he'd already been embarrassed enough thanks to Professor Sutcliffe. Don came trotting across the room, his steps light as the wind, and paused, leaning over Wallace.

"I can't do this," Wallace said with a small depreciating laugh.

"Yet. You can't do it, yet," Don said as he held his hands out for Wallace to grab.

Wallace clenched his jaw to keep from rolling his eyes, Don's optimism teetering expertly on the line of annoying, he thought as he grabbed Don's hands. Wallace pulled before Don seemed ready and the result was Don letting out a high yelp before he stumbled forward and landed over Wallace.

A laugh caught in Wallace's throat as he heard Don's face smack into the top of the soft chair before he rolled into the seat with him. The sudden closeness caught Wallace off guard, his hands fumbling against Don's back who seemed to be in the middle of a coughing or laughing fit. Wallace tucked his hands in over his chest as Don started to kick, trying to get his balance as he squirmed off Wallace and flopped off, landing on the floor beside him.

"You okay?" Wallace glanced over, waiting for Don to have his share of the day's embarrassment or shame, but instead the boy started to laugh. A full body laugh, that started in his shoulders, racked Don's body and even after cupping his hands to his mouth Wallace could still hear his joyful chortle.

"My stomach – it hurts from laughi –" Don groaned, but didn't stop laughing. Don rolled to his side, and kept laughing until a hand clamped down on his shoulder, yanking him from the floor. Don's evergreen eyes popped open, staring with mild fear down at Wallace, as if he hadn't been able to comprehend what happened.

Wallace looked above Don to find his brother, Nat, standing there, a handful of Don's shirt in his grasp.

"What is it with us Lilys and lies?" Nat asked as he let go of Don's shirt, only to take a firmer grip on his collar. "You told me you were dropping off the food and heading back, Bella."

"I – I was, I just..." Don murmured, his eyes still locked with Wallace. "Nat, it you would just give me –"

"Give ya what? A chance, five more minutes, a wedgie so bad you'll feel it in your eyes? You know which one I'm partial to," Nat asked with a wicked grin, angling Don around so they faced each other. "There's serial killers and shit out there Bella, you can't be hanging around with whoever you want." Nat glanced to Wallace with narrowed eyes that seemed to melt Wallace to the leather. "We're leaving."

Before Don could object, Nat yanked him along like a disobedient pet. As they left the lounge, Wallace tried to make out the string of words Don seemed to be mouthing to him, but quickly gave up and slouched into the chair.

Shifting around until he was comfortable, Wallace found himself curled up backwards in the chair, mind running with the events of the day and the possibilities of what tomorrow might bring. Though he knew better than to spend another night sleeping in the basement, something rooted him to the chair and held him there until thoughts of rivers and water took him under.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirteen

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Just one new entry this chapter, **Cosmo Freelily** by **Shinyeeveeee.**

 **Question of the Chapter #12:** Do you think Wallace really cares about the people are him, the people he hurts, or is it an act?


	14. Who Are You?

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Fourteen – Who Are You**

 _Humankind cannot bear very much reality._ _\- T.S. Elio_ _t_

* * *

Going into the second week, the university didn't seem as pristine as it had before. As Wallace left Neroli Hall, the campus' bedlam atmosphere of the subsequent week made the brick buildings and the school's defining features – the perfect geometry of the landscaping, the immaculate stone arrangement of the fountain – seem like ruins belonging to an invaded and overrun civilization. Students were sprinting from their classes and gathering in newly formed cliques across the open lawns between buildings. Pokémon fluttered overhead, leaped between treetops, and chased each other across the bleached-out walkways, all elements of chaos that seemed lacking before.

As Wallace followed the walkway past the library, the events of the class weighed heavily on his mind. Despite finding it easy to follow along, and at times shine, in Professor Till's statistics class, he couldn't help but feel shaken by the cold shoulders Neo and Garret gave him when he attempted yet another apology at the start of class, but, as it had the previous week, their dismissal of him gave him the entire class to talk to Tempest.

"Wallace, wait up."

He recognized the voice and slowed, but didn't turn until Tempest came trotting up beside him, feigning to be out of breath.

"Everything okay? You jetted out of there pretty fast," Tempest said as they started walking, taking the curve in front of the library and following a path to the fountains.

"Mhm," Wallace answered as he nibbled at his lower lid, mind wandering onto thoughts of Garret. Outside of forced interactions in class, Wallace hadn't seen Garret since the day of the red alert. He was sure Garret ventured back to the room to change for classes, evident by little things moved around or missing in the room, but no matter how long he waited after breakfast or before class, he never seemed to catch him.

"Going to class today?" Tempest asked as she hugged a small stack of textbooks to her chest, her eyes cast on the sky cloudless sky.

Wallace cocked a brow at her question. He hadn't missed any of his classes yet, aside from when Professor Sutcliffe made him stay over when he was late, which had unfortunately happened twice last week.

"Sorry. I can tell you don't enjoy Professor McCloud's class that much," Tempest said.

"Yeah," he said. "Everyone's pokémon are just stronger than mine."

"Don't worry, you'll get stronger over time. So, want me to walk you to class?"

"Aren't boys supposed to walk girls to class?" Wallace asked.

"Don't be so sexist," she joked as she rose up on her tiptoes, increasing the already evident height difference between them. "Besides, I've got a couple inches on you, I could be your bodyguard."

Before Wallace could utter a reply, elgyem swung around the side of Wallace's head, fiercely blinking the red digit on his hand at Tempest. "Elgy!" he grunted.

"I think elgyem's got that covered," Wallace said, smiling.

"Fine," Tempest said, exaggerating a sigh. "I guess we'll just have to walk to class as equals. But, lunch first? If you're free. I invited Arlette, but I think she's going to be pretty tied up with talking to the school officials."

"Arlette?" Wallace asked, his feet scuffing across the stone path.

"She came back to campus early this morning, police escort and everything," Tempest said. "I thought someone was breaking into my room, but it was her. We talked for a just a little bit, but I could tell she needed her rest. She said the police finished questioning her last week, but she'd been staying with a friend in Camphrier."

Wallace stayed a few paces behind Tempest the rest of their walk to the Student Union, his conversation from the previous week replaying in his mind.

 _As Wallace locked eyes with himself in his mirror, he listened to the ringing in his ear as he waited for the call to go through. His chest still thumping from the call with his father, Wallace could feel his heartbeat in the veins of his eyes and could feel the blood rushing through his face, warming his cheeks. "I need your help," he said the moment the ringing stopped._

" _Well, hello to you too," Izumi said through the phone. "What do you need now? Is this a walk and talk conversation or should I turn around and come back inside?"_

" _No, keep going." Wallace stepped forward and pressed himself against the dressers, entering a kind of staring contest with himself before his eyes fell to a jagged line of moles along his cheek. "It's Arlette. I was thinking about what you said, how I have the power to help her, and I should."_

" _Oh, well look at that, someone decided to become a decent human being. I hope it was something I said."_

 _Wallace rolled his eyes and sucked at his teeth, letting Izumi have his moment. "So what would it take to get her out of there?"_

" _A lawyer, for starts," Izumi said. "I take it you know plenty?"_

" _What makes you say that?"_

 _Izumi laughed through the line before coughing and regaining his composure. "Handsome kid like you, rich daddy, I'm sure you've had a lawyer come to bat for you once or twice."_

" _You think I'm handsome?" Wallace asked, eyeing himself differently in the mirror._

" _Well sure, but don't get me wrong, you won't find me scratching at your door like a skitty in heat, but I could understand the appeal from the point of view of one lucky girl or boy," Izumi said, sounding uncomfortable with the topic._

" _I like girls," Wallace said dryly._

" _Don't we all. So, do you know a lawyer or not?"_

" _I do, but they all work exclusively for my father, as in they only handle cases he's involved it, or that involve the company, and they're on retainer the rest of the time and contracted not to accept work," Wallace said. "So if I give you their number they're going to refuse and then all eyes will be on you."_

" _Right, so that's out of the question."_

" _Can't you pretend to be a lawyer, or find one?" Wallace asked. "Or find someone to pretend? Isn't this what you do?"_

 _Izumi sighed, more annoyed than exasperated. "It's not like I have guys lined up who are waiting to put their necks on the line to play charades in front of the police, but I guess I can work something out. If they've already checked the footage from Camphrier it shouldn't be too hard to get her released if they've finished their questioning."_

" _Thank you," Wallace said, a weight easing off his shoulders._

" _Is that all?"_

" _Actually, one more thing."_

* * *

"Café or dining room?" Tempest asked as they wandered through the Student Union, intruding on a back to school sign up event happening in the lobby. "What are you hungry for?"

Despite their Tuesday and Thursday lunches quickly becoming a habit for them, Tempest treated them with renewed excitement. "Summer salad," Wallace said smiling as he looked towards the glass windows of the Azure Bay Café. He wished he'd bothered to put the food Don brought him in Garret's mini fridge that night, but the act seemed selfish, so his unfinished salad ended up in the trash that morning, the thought of having another suddenly occurring to him.

"Changing it up? Café it is," Tempest said as she led the way into a large room scattered with beige tables, square, rectangular, and circular, that matched the wainscoted walls.

Televisions overlapped one another in sound as different programs played around the room, mixed interchangeably with the conversation of students who took up seats at the low and high tables as well in cushy booths along the adjacent wall. A large and curved marble bar was attached to a navy blue wall that jutted out towards the center of the room where the inviting aroma of coffee lured In a line of students.

A gathering in the corner of the room, to the left of the entrance, caught Wallace's attention and while he kept Tempest in his periphery, he looked around to find Arlette there, lost within the folds of the same grey hoodie she always seemed to be wearing, surrounded by older men in suits and dress shirts. She looked to be in the middle of an interrogation, but only one of the men spoke to her, using soft hand gestures and Arlette only responded with frantic bobs or shakes of her head.

For a second he thought he saw her eyes flick in his direction, but under the butter yellow light, it was hard to tell. Having lost sight of Tempest, Wallace turned back and swerved to avoid running into a pillar and nearly toppled over as he came to stop in front of a booth occupied by Neo, Garret, Eleanor, and Christopher, the latter whom Wallace was surprised to see out of bed.

"Hey," Wallace said, full of breath. All eyes rose up to meet him, save for Garret who seemed to be distracting himself by picking at his nails.

Christopher was the only one to respond to him with a short wave of his hand and a small smile.

Digging the edge of his shoe in the wooden floor, Wallace teetered from side to side in front of the table, bending at his ankle. "Eleanor, uh, how are you?" he asked, unable to look anywhere besides the strip of gauze taped to her cheek. The inappropriate thought of what her scar looked like prodded his mind.

"I'm fine," she said, her eyes quickly falling to the table.

"Neo," Wallace said, nodding to the boy whose tablet was flashing like the lights of a siren. "Garret."

Garret's head twitched as if he fought the urge to face Wallace, but he kept looking at his nails, his head facing forward.

As Wallace mulled over something else to say, Tempest came back to his side. "I found us seats on the patio," she said before her eyes fell across the table. "Oh, are these your friends?"

"No," Neo answered quickly before he turned his attention back to his tablet and the rest of the table seemed to do the same, each finding something else to focus on.

"Oh, well, nice to meet you I guess?" Tempest said slowly as if she realized she'd stumbled onto something complicated.

Wallace kept his eyes on the table, hoping one of them would look his way, as he followed Tempest around a series of pillars in the room to make their way back to the bar to order. After ordering their salads Wallace and Tempest relocated out a pair of glass doors to the wide patio outside the café, decorated with black metal tables and chairs.

"Everything okay?" Tempest asked once they were seated, their backs to the wind, her voice soft and tentative, as if she knew she was entering sensitive territory. "Those boys, they're all in stats with us, right? They look familiar."

"Yeah and they hate me, well two of them do," Wallace said followed by a snort of a laugh as he picked at a spot of chipping black coating on the metal table. "And I don't blame them. I was pretty awful to them the day of the alert."

"You were one of the students in the safari," Tempest said as if the realization had just hit her.

"Yeah." After tearing off a chunk of paint Wallace laid his hands flat on the table in an attempt to force himself to sit still.

Tempest leaned forward in her seat and placed her hand flat over Wallace's. "I think it's natural for you not to be completely fine after something like that happens. I don't know all the details, but I bet your friends will forgive you, for whatever you did, and everything will work out."

A thrum of excitement exploded from Wallace's hand at the moment of contact with Tempest, an electric network created a constant circuit up his arm and across his chest, up through his mind, that deafened him to everything that came from her lips. All he could think about was how he didn't want her hand to move, but if it had to, for it to move further up his arm and somehow find his face, but just as those thoughts raged on, Tempest pulled her hand down into her lap as a worker stepped up beside their table and dropped off two plastic bowls that held their lunch.

"Yum," Tempest crooned as she pried open her cutlery kit and dug in.

Wallace, feeling the after effect that could only be described as the numbing weightlessness that came after a blow to the head, eyed his food with less enthusiasm as he had the night before.

"Room for two more?"

Wallace sat straight up as he watched two shadows fall over their table, half expecting it to be Neo and Garret, but he was surprised, and pleased, to see Simone and Ben pulling out chairs at their table.

"Oh, please," Tempest said as she covered her mouth with one hand and gestured for them to sit with the other.

Looking between the two of them, Ben and Simone looked to be dressed for different times of the day. Simone was dressed down in athletic gear, her long dark hair swinging across her back from a high ponytail, a glimmer of sweat across her brow. Meanwhile, Ben's lanky frame was slumped over in a baggy blue hoodie and sweatpants, dark circles prominent under his eyes, his brown hair sticking up in odd points.

"Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt your date," Simone said with an evil grin as she plucked the largest berry off the top of Wallace's salad and popped it into her mouth.

"It's not a date," Tempest laughed, looking extremely amused at the idea, a sight that made Wallace's stomach churn.

"So you're single?" Simone asked. "Hear that Ben?"

Ben's mouth rose into a quick smile as he let out a short and uncomfortable sounding laugh.

"He's shy," Simone said as she waved Ben off and reached out, snagging another berry off Wallace's salad. "Anyway, I saw you inside and wanted to tell you the grief counseling meeting was rescheduled for tonight, six o'clock, Bridge of Learning in Myrrh. Ben's still making me go so I'm still making you go. Well, I'm out, see you later. Nice to meet you," Simone said as she shot up before she paused behind Tempest. "Oh, I didn't get your name."

"Tempest Tlaloc," she replied with a bright smile and an extended hand.

Simone bobbed her head before she slapped Tempest's hand and engaged her in a complex one-sided handshake. "I'm Simone and I'm late for class."

Ben stood from the table and nodded his head to Wallace and Tempest before he trailed after Simone, whom he dwarfed by what looked like at least a foot. While Wallace watched Simone and Ben follow the walkway away from the Student Union, he ran through a checklist of his schedule for the day. After awaking to a phone call that morning from Andrew's mom he was supposed to meet her at this afternoon and now had to be done by six for the meeting.

"They seem fun," Tempest said.

Judging by the smile on her face Wallace guessed she was being genuine, and not snide, so he smiled back before he started in on his salad, picking out small chunks of berries and offering them up to elgyem, who accepted them happily.

* * *

After lunch, he and Tempest took the long way back across campus towards the Origin Center, passing the library again, and crossing a small lot for campus vehicles to enter the Center through a side door that led directly into an indoor court. Wallace looked up to find the ceiling open. All last week the ceiling had been closed, but now, springs and gears were coiled back against the walls and had opened the ceiling up in the center as a drawbridge might lift apart.

Walking along the track they approached the typical gathering of students standing by one of the partition walls that divided the track from a row of exercise equipment. At the center of the students half-circle, sitting carelessly on the wall was the robust looking Professor McCloud. She was dressed in a plain yellow shirt and khakis, a light jacket hanging off her shoulders and a pair of sneakers that kicked the wall as her legs bounced up and down. Her thick tufts of rich brown hair were brushed back over her shoulders, falling down her back.

The closer they came, Wallace noticed a series of scratches and scars that lined the woman's arms, marring her olive skin with dark grooves.

Zoning in and out of the chatter around him, Wallace scanned the faces of the other students and found Neo and Garret standing near the front of the pack.

"Tori, what time is it?"

The students quieted down as the professor on the wall spoke, her voice loud and commanding in spite of her compact appearance. As the group looked around at each other, searching for Tori, a soft muttering could be heard across the track.

Craning his neck around Wallace saw Tori, the professor's mudkip, zipping across the floor towards them. On all fours it darted into the crowd of students, whizzing around the feet of students who were stomping around, trying not to step on it.

The professor slid off the wall, landing in a crouch before the mudkip leaped into her arms and then up to her shoulder. Two strings hung from the pokémon's neck, one held a stopwatch and the other was tied around a large grey stone.

The woman scratched under the pokémon's chin before she held the stopwatch in her hand. "Time to start!" she said, louder than necessary considering her entire audience waited no more than ten feet in front of her. The woman started, but cut off as her eyes locked onto Wallace. She raised an arm and pointed directly at him. "You, come here."

Blood rushed to Wallace's face as the students turned to him, even Neo and Garret looked back, but snapped their heads forward once they saw him. When he didn't make a move the professor narrowed her eyes and snapped her fingers.

"Wallace, either you come up or I drag you up by your glasses!" the professor snapped.

Mechanically, Wallace stepped forward, weaving through the other students until he was standing beside the professor, hovering at least a foot over the older woman.

"This is what I want to see people," she said as she gestured to elgyem, perched comfortably on Wallace's shoulder. "In my class, you need to always have a pokémon out and at your side, ready for anything! It's been a week since we first met for class and this is the first time I've seen anyone come prepared like this! "A+ for you Wallace, good job."

"Thank you, Professor McCloud," Wallace said. "Really?"

"No, not really, now go back into the group," Professor McCloud said as she waved him off.

Uncertain, Wallace walked unsteady back to the crowd and watched as the professor wound up her hand and went to smack him on the back. But being severely shorter than him her hand veered towards his lower back and ended up clapping against his butt. Wallace let out a surprised gasp and turned back to the professor who had her hands curled in tightly at her chest.

"Ooh, so sorry, don't report me, it was an accident, I swear." Professor McCloud said, her lips turned down and her teeth bared like a child caught stealing candy.

The students held on an uncomfortable group laugh for a bit as Wallace walked back to his place beside Tempest who regarded him with a look of uncertainty.

"Professional as always," Tempest said as she leaned closer to Wallace. "Don't you always come to class with elgyem on your shoulder?"

Wallace nodded, wincing as the professor started chatting up a student in the front of the group.

"So she's just now noticing you?" Tempest asked. "Professional as always," she repeated.

Professor McCloud cleared her throat before she started walking back and forth before the wall. "This week I think we'll focus on sparring sessions. Last week I had you work on accuracy and evasiveness, but I think it's time we do some real practice. So, find a partner and start a battle. Tori and I will be going around and I'll be making notes on how you all do." She raised a hand and bobbed her finger through the air as her lips moved in silence. "Pair up!"

As the students started to find partners, Wallace turned eagerly to Tempest just in time to see Neo stepping back through the crowd and placing himself in front of her. His heart sank seeing the look of smug determination in his eyes. "Neo," he said, his eyes finding Garret hovering at the front of the group.

"We're doing this," Neo said. "And not just because I'm still pissed at you either for blowing Ellie off or smacking Garret around."

"I didn't smack him around!" Wallace protested.

"But because I want to drive my point home that your pokémon aren't worth anything when it comes to class ranking," Neo said, ignoring Wallace's defense of his actions. "Maybe then you'll start to realize you do need friends and you'll stop tossing them around like they don't matter."

"I don't think so!"

Wallace recoiled back from a booming voice coming at him fast before he felt a hand on his shoulder and he was shoved out of the way. As he regained his balance, nearly crashing into another student, Wallace saw Persia, the girl Don faced in the tournament, squaring herself up in front of Neo.

"You're the one who keeps a record of everyone in his tablet, huh?" Persia asked, her arms crossed over her chest. "I want to know if what you've got on me is accurate. Persia Swift, you got that?"

"I assure you my data is immaculate," Neo said, adjusting his glasses, his emerald eyes bypassing Persia to focus on Wallace. "And I saw plenty of your battle tactics when you let your talonflame get beaten by two grass types."

Persia dropped her arms, her fists clenching at her sides. "I've got my own source of info, I heard Don's roserade wiped the floor with your lampent. True or false?"

Wallace watched Neo's focus shift off him and back to Persia, his hand reaching to his waistline as he pulled a Poké Ball off. Persia took that simple action as an acceptance of her challenge and led Neo away from the crowd, towards the center of the indoor track to the arena markings on the ground.

Despite the professor's instructions for everyone to pair off and spar, many students followed Persia and Neo to the arena and watched as they called out their pokémon. As Wallace walked opposite the shifting crowd, he saw Persia call out something too small to see from his distance and Neo send out his onix.

The matchup, against whatever Persia had brought out, had the students cheering, but the remainder of the class remained on the track, breaking off into groups to battle. Wallace scanned the court for Tempest, only to find her paired off with another student. His stomach sank when he realized Garret seemed to be the only one left without a partner.

"Go on, Wallace!" Professor McCloud called from her spot by the wall.

Wallace pulled spinarak's ball from his pocket as he approached Garret, who seemed to have relented to their matchup as well and pulled out a Poké Ball of his own, unceremoniously calling out his pokémon, something small and blue with bug eyes and long floppy antenna.

"It's a chinchou," Garret said softly. "I caught it at the beach when we were at the safari. His name is Lane."

The pit in Wallace's stomach twisted into a knot and he thought he might actually be sick listening to Garret's distraught voice, his eyes never rising to meet his own. With about as much flair as Garret had put into it, Wallace released spinarak who hopped across the floor excitedly.

"Bubblebeam, Lane."

The chinchou's cheeks puffed up in an instant before a jet stream of bubbles sprayed from its small mouth. Not aimed directly at spinarak, the bubbles moved without direction in a flurry around spinarak, floating inches around the small pokémon, but never making contact.

"Spinarak, use poison sting," Wallace said, eyeing the bubbles that hung suspended around them.

Spinarak's mandibles opened and a spray of needle-like projectiles fired from his mouth. Before they could reach Lane, one of the projectiles stuck a bubble and a chain reaction started. Every bubble surrounding spinarak quivered before small fractures appeared on them and they exploded with gushes of water and sound.

Wallace cupped his ears as the chorus of bubbles popped before him, but over that he could hear spinarak's cries as the explosions jostled him around, knocking him into the air at one point.

Through narrowed eyes, Wallace made out Garret's lips moving before Lane began rubbing the tips of its antenna together. Waves of light, easy to miss, seemed to warble through the air before encasing spinarak as he fell.

As the deafening popping sound faded Wallace watched spinarak struggle to right himself after landing on his back. The small pokémon's legs twitched as he rocked side to side, but before he could get his legs under him, his body seized, as if an invisible hand was squeezing him, constricting his movements.

"Another bubblebeam, Lane."

Wallace's eyes flicked up to Garret and chinchou in time to see the pokémon's cheeks filling with the onset of another attack. But despite his urgings, spinarak still wasn't able to get up. Spinarak snapped his mandibles at the air, biting furiously at nothing as another crippling seizure took hold of him.

Garret's chinchou sailed across Wallace's vision, faster than he thought the small blue pokémon should be capable of, and slammed into spinarak. A solid body blow that upended spinarak and sent it wheeling into the air. Screeching, spinarak turned an awkward somersault and landed on his thrashing legs, still clenching and moving rigidly.

"Get in close for a bubblebeam!" Garret crowed.

Lane's cheeks bulged before it padded off across the track again. Although spinarak didn't seem capable of moving as fast, whatever crippled it seem to release its hold of him for an instant as the pokémon collided, spinarak's mouthpiece snapping against Lane's flesh.

Wallace looked up to Garret who was brushing aside the bang of his light brown hair that concealed his eye, a look of determination hardening across his features.

He looked back to the pokémon as they broke apart. Lane was panting, its bulbous body going like a bellows. One of its antennae hung limply from its head and a glob of blood dribbled down beside of its eyes. Spinarak was limping back, favoring his trembling right side.

While Wallace's mind buzzed with how he was going to continue the battle, or if he should forfeit, Garret recalled Lane, but followed it bringing out another pokémon. His mareep, Amber, hit the track with a loud bleating sound and before she turned and ran back to her trainer, rubbing her thick coat against his legs.

"Thanks," Garret said as he crouched and scratched at her head. "We're going to do our best right?"

Amber cried out again, this time less joyful and more focused before she turned back towards Wallace who recalled spinarak.

"Elgyem?" he asked, looking to his shoulder.

"Elgy?" he asked, blinking the yellow pads on his hands at Wallace.

"Don't worry about winning, just do your best, okay?" Wallace asked as he shrugged his shoulder, urging elgyem on.

Elgyem bobbed his head before he pushed off from his spot and floated down onto the track, standing before Amber.

"Thunder shock!" Garret called out, throwing his arm out in the process.

Wallace watched as sparks of white electricity concentrated over Amber's wool before she fired a single jagged streak. The bolt missed elgyem, zigzagging in the air and striking somewhere over Wallace's head. He ducked and covered his head, the static in the air raising the hair on his arms.

"Again," Garret said.

"Elgyem!" Wallace shouted, still ducked down. He watched as Amber fired off another bolt, faster than before, but elgyem raised his arms in time. As he had done in the mansion, elgyem summoned a translucent purple barrier that intercepted the thunder shock.

The sight hurt Wallace's eyes as Amber's attack somehow remained in a constant form, buzzing and sparkling again elgyem's barrier before the wall shrunk and elgyem pushed forward, sending the thunder shock back towards Amber. The wool pokémon leaped aside, casually letting her attack fly overhead and strike Garret.

Wallace gasped as he rose back up, but Garret seemed unaffected. The same static Wallace had felt seemed to be in full effect around Garret as the boy's hair stood up as if invisible hands had raked gel through it, fully showing both of his eyes under his corrugated brow.

"Stop!" Professor McCloud said as she rushed into the middle of the track. She stopped at Garret's side, placing a hand on his shoulder as she tried to make eye contact with him. "Are you alright? That was a direct hit."

Garret smiled and shook his head before he pulled at his shirt, a dark blue crew neck. "It's specially made to resist electricity. I felt it, but it's fine. I can keep going."

Professor McCloud looked over her shoulder, her brows up and her shoulder shrugged as if impressed by Garret. "We'll keep going then. That okay with you, Wallace?"

Wallace bit his lip as he looked to elgyem, who only regarded him with the blinking yellow lights of indecisiveness before he looked back to Garret. He no longer looked like the meek boy he'd run into on his first day. Perhaps it was his hair or the look in his eyes, but Wallace felt their sparring match was about to become personal. "I give up," he said as he stepped across the track and pulled elgyem into his arms.

"Are you really conceding?" the professor asked.

Wallace nodded and swallowed down a ball of spit.

"Alright," Professor McCloud said with a shrug. "There's a medical machine in the lobby, feel free to heal your spinarak and leave for the day if you like."

Wallace turned his back on Garret, who crouched and opened his arms as Amber ran to him, and Professor McCloud as he followed the track and headed into the building, into the white tile lobby filled with award display cases.

After he loaded spinarak's ball into a smaller and less time efficient version of the machine used in Pokémon Centers, Wallace walked the length of the lobby, buzzing with anxiety and determination as he waited for the melodic humming of the machine to finish.

* * *

After leaving the Origin Center, making sure he avoided any possible run-ins with Garret or Neo, a thought that made him laugh at the irony that he was avoiding them now, he wandered campus. Walking along the west side of the island he collected handfuls of berries to share with elgyem and spinarak and spent considerable time lounging on the lawn before his phone buzzed with a message from Carrie.

 **Sitting Fountains**

The short message stirred the contents of his stomach into bubbles and nearly brought on actual vomit. As he headed that way he silently kicked himself for not suggesting they meet somewhere less open. Rounding the corner from the lawn outside the Performance Maison, Wallace saw the fountains as packed as usual. Every square stone that flanked the fountains was occupied by students and foldable tables and chairs had been set up in the plaza as a means of advertising for more back to school events.

Couples and groups were sitting at many of the tables around the fountain, but Wallace walked found Carrie instantly. She sat alone, and crossed legged, in an all black dress that seemed too hot for the summer heat that had brought everyone to the fountains in the first place.

"Thank you for meeting me, I know you're probably busy," she said once he approached. Her hands worked around a pack of cigarettes, an oversized pair of black sunglasses resting comfortably across her aged, but timeless beautiful face. "Signing up for any of these events?" she asked, weakly gesturing to the plaza before she took her glasses off. "A fraternity, perhaps?"

Wallace straightened out his fingers and raised them to his forehead, half-visor, and half-salute, as he stopped short of her circular table. "On the phone this morning, you said you heard something?" he asked, ignoring what he felt was Carrie's need to prod into his life.

"Regarding Andrew's whereabouts, the police have been receiving pings," she said as she opened her hands in explosive actions for emphasis. "These pings are locations where his trainer ID has been used to access his storage. The reason this matters is because it creates a path." Carrie touched a manicured nail to the table and dragged it in a straight line, the sound raising Wallace's skin into bumps as if she'd taken a blade to a chalkboard.

"They go from Lumiose to Camphrier, from there to Cyllage, and then all the way up to Coumarine, stopping at every city and town in between," Carrie said, with an air to her voice as if she had been the one to discover the pings. "The dates of these pings seem to follow the timeline of his disappearance. So they're thinking now that he may have taken a boat to another region, which is what my wusband believes," Carrie said, disgusted as she pulled a cigarette from the pack.

"Wusband?" Wallace asked.

"He _was_ my husband, but now he's my wusband, Charles," Carrie said as she lit the end of the cigarette and waved it in the air. "They found another pinged location in the Johto region."

"How'd they figure that out?" Wallace asked, watching the creases in Carrie's neck as she took a long drag.

"Anonymous tip," she said, her words laced with grey smoke. "They got a call from a relative of a student here at the school who said they saw Andrew around Shalour City just before classes started. They wondered why he might be there and so they did the sweep and _ping_! Now they're making calls overseas to look into it."

Wallace smiled as Carrie turned her narrowed eyes on passing students. "That sounds really promising," he said. "You sound, hopeful."

"I am," she replied, though her tone seemed defensive as she stood and gathered her purse, stuffing the cigarette pack inside. "I just thought you ought to know. You and your father are probably butting heads again and I can't count on him to keep you updated, so I'm glad you made time to see me. I'm off." Carried replaced her sunglasses and put her cigarette out on the tabletop.

She then pulled Wallace into a hug that smelled of floral perfume and smoke before she stalked off across campus, heading to the docks. Wallace waited until she was out of sight before he turned and made his way around Rose-Absolute Hall, a smile growing across his face.

* * *

" _Thank you," Wallace said, a weight easing off his shoulders._

" _Is that all?"_

" _Actually, one more thing."_

" _Oh joy," Izumi said._

" _It doesn't involve the police," Wallace assured. "Well, not really. I know they're looking to track Andrew using the log-ins from his trainer account. Is it possible to set up fake trails? Like you did for me."_

" _To make them think he's traveling and not pushing up daisies?" Izumi asked. "Yeah, it's possible. Where are we sending him exactly?"_

" _Out of Kalos," Wallace said, thinking about his father's lie to Charles. "However you do it, just make it seem like he left the region. Doesn't matter where to."_

" _Alright kid, but you know, nothing in life is free," Izumi said._

" _Of course, put it on my tab," Wallace said as he ended the call, a swelling feeling of pride in his chest._

* * *

As Wallace followed posted signs in Myrrh Hall that directed him towards the meeting in the Bridge of Learning, he realized that despite his expectations, it wasn't actually a bridge – though it did connect Myrrh and Neroli Halls – rather it was a large connecting classroom.

The room was much bigger than needed for the meeting as Wallace only saw a handful of people gathered at the front of the slanted room. Tiers of fixed seats were placed near the back of the room before the slope evened out into the room and tables and rolling chairs had been lined up. His heavy footfalls garnered the attention of the others in the room as they came towards the front. Wallace saw Ben and Simone already seated as well as Don's head perk up from one of the desks in the front, a sight that quelled his uneasy feeling about the meeting before he saw Eleanor straighten up beside him.

Once he reached the front of the room he was thankful that Simone and Ben had come early and taken the seats closest to Eleanor, as he found himself at the edge of the row. Despite sitting three seats down from her, Wallace found himself attuned to every moment Eleanor made. In silence, he couldn't help but a feel a trigger of unease every time she tapped her hands on the table, said something to Don, or cleared her throat. Every action of hers a reminder of the moment her arcanine tore into Chara's meganium and the fact that she didn't stop it. A battle raged inside him, conflicted on how to feel about her, dismayed that she'd allowed her pokémon to take another life, or to forgive the incident because she risked her own in the process of saving his.

In an attempt to distract himself, Wallace focused on two more people at the front of the room. The first one his eyes fell on was a young girl. She sat off to the side, beside a wooden podium, looking particularly unremarkable and pale. She was dressed in a pair of baby blue shorts and a yellow shirt, her black and white sneakers bending at the top as she dug her toe into the carpet. A ruffled bob, the color of dark chocolate, fell just below her shoulders and a wide pair of blue-green eyes were looking over the group.

A man walked in a groove beside her. He was tall with dark skin and an immaculate looking faded haircut. A maroon flannel hung off his thin body as his high tops paced the floor in a casual manner. His head was down, face practically buried in a manilla folder that reminded Wallace of the folders he kept stashed in his duffel in his closet.

His attention moved from the man to a large pokémon egg that sat, swaddled in a blanket, in a chair at the front of the room. It was different from how elgyem's egg had been. The one resting on the chair was a pale blue-green with a connecting cream colored band across the middle with red triangular markings above and below the band.

As Wallace let his mind wander onto thoughts of what might hatch, a stack of chairs toppled over in the far corner of the room and several pokémon came bolting from that direction. Eevee – Wallace recognized from Andrew's streams on PokéView – two of them came darting out, side by side, and ducked under the table. One of them pawed at Ben's leg, mewling until he picked it up and placed it in his lap. The other ran directly into Eleanor's legs and then managed to leap into her lap, nuzzling itself into her stomach.

The last was larger than the eevee, and at first blush, Wallace thought it was a giant egg. A large blue and white pokémon with an egg-like body waddled across the room, its floppy blue ears and springy tail bounced as it ducked under the table and pressed it against Simone's legs.

"I invited everyone to let their pokémon out as a way to relax and break the tension."

Wallace looked up to find the man in flannel standing above him, large brown eyes staring down at him and a warm smile greeting him. "Uh..." Wallace touched a hand to his shoulder, vacant without elgyem who he left sleeping beside spinarak on his bed. "I didn't bring mine."

"That's fine, you can help me out then!" the man said as he spun on his heel and with long legs crossed back to the front of the room. He scooped the egg and its blanket up in his arms before he came to the side of the table and forced it into Wallace's arms.

"Oh, okay," Wallace said, taken back as he smoothed out the thick fleece fabric. It took a few moments to become acquainted with the egg's size, much larger than elgyem's had been, but he quickly fell into a familiar position of cradling the egg.

"You're a natural," the man said as he cupped his hand to Wallace's shoulder. "Have you hatched an egg before?"

"Sort of," Wallace muttered. "I had one and it hatched, I guess. I didn't look after it for long, though." He felt a pang in his chest when he thought about how long Andrew must have had the egg and how he wanted it to be ready to hatch for him, a plan that got cut short.

The man hummed in acknowledgement, tipping his head left and right at Wallace as if sizing him and the egg up. "Well, why don't you keep that one?" he said before he vanished from Wallace's side.

"Wait, what?" Wallace asked, but the man was moving back to the front of the room and he could feel the other eyes in the room on him. Feeling imposed on, Wallace glanced down the line in time to see Eleanor jerk her head away. His eyes then fell to Don who was holding a small blue pokémon with thick leaves coming out of its head against his chest. "I don't know about this," Wallace said.

"You'll do fine." The man smiled, all teeth, and waved Wallace off. "I left my pokémon in the daycare for a bit too long and ended up with an extra egg I didn't need. I was going to leave it with the infirmary to raise, but perhaps you not coming with your pokémon was a sign it was meant for you?" He paused for a breath, studying the ceiling before he shrugged. "Nah, probably not, but I'm giving it to you anyway! Now, let's get started!"

The man clapped his hands together before he turned to the front of the room and grabbed a string that hung from the bottom of a projector screen. After a good tug, he let the string go and the screen rolled to the top, revealing a green chalkboard beneath, already marked on. **DENVY DEHAAN** had been scrawled across the board in sloppy print above the words: **JUNIOR ASSISTANT – DEAN OF STUDENTS.**

"I'm Denvy, that's me!" Denvy said proudly, thumbing himself in the chest. "I work for the dean of students and after hearing about the ordeal in our safari islands the university felt it was important to provide the students with an outlet." Somehow Denvy slid across the floor, despite it being carpet, and stopped beside the girl, gesturing to her like she was a prize to be won on a game show. "And this is!"

"Mieko Chikage," the girl said with a short wave and a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Tell them what you do, Mieko," Denvy said, egging her on.

Mieko bit her lower lip and sighed. "I work as an assistant to one of the university secretaries, who happens to be my brother."

"Uh huh, uh huh," Denvy said, bobbing his head in the most animated way possible.

Wallace watched as what little light and enthusiasm Mieko had faded quickly, and he figured she probably had bigger fires burning.

Denvy pushed Mieko's chair in closer to their row of tables before he grabbed a chair from himself and rolled up beside her. "So, were you all there the day in the safari?"

Wallace looked down the line to Don, who politely raised his hand to speak.

"Hi, I'm Don. And I was there, but I didn't ever see that man," Don said, stroking the leaves on his pokémon's head. "But I'm here to support my friend, Ellie," he said with a sideways bob to Eleanor.

"Support is good. It's important to have people to talk to. If not your classmates or family then know you can come to me. I have an office in the basement of the Student Union," Denvy said before he rolled back and grabbed the folder from before off the podium. "I was given files on all of you, except you, Don. Eleanor," Denvy said, testing the name like a teacher doing roll call. "The scar on your face, do you mind if we talk about it?"

Eleanor looked up and down the line, even locking eyes with Wallace for a moment before she nodded. "O-Okay."

"The bandage," Denvy said, his voice taking on a more serious tone.

Wallace watched Eleanor reach up and touch the gauze on her cheek, for a second he thought she might remove it, but she just dropped her hand back into her lap. "It's still healing, but I-I don't know if I want to take it off," she said, her shoulders jumping in half formed shrugs. "Even after it's better."

"It's not uncommon for victims of to wear bandages to cover scars," Denvy said, like an apology. "I'm guessing people notice it and make you feel uncomfortable about it."

Eleanor nodded and dipped her head down. "It feels like they feel sorry for me, but I think I'd rather them not notice me at all."

"Do you think that keeping the bandage on is going to make that stop?" Denvy asked. "'Cause it seems to me like, when it's time, if you removed the bandage, people might stop staring, accept it as part of you."

"That's bull," Simone droned out, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. "She shouldn't have to parade a scar around just because people are sick and nosy and want to know everything." Simone scooted forward towards the table and slammed her palm down on it, startling the others in the row. "Eleanor! Listen to me girl, I would give anyone who looks at you cross the glare of death. They didn't go through what you did and they have no right to judge you. Wear a bandage, wear a mask if you want, or show your scar, but do it because you want to, not because you want to satisfy the curiosity of others."

Wallace puffed up his cheeks and frowned, feeling Simone's words aimed right for him and his own sick curiosity with Eleanor's scar.

"What if people want to reach out and help her? But they don't know how to approach her?" Denvy asked, holding his hand out to Eleanor like a tray was balanced on his palm. "These type of things happen when people go through traumatic events, that feeling of not knowing what to say to them."

"I just think people should mind their own business," Simone said as she crossed her arms again and dropped back into her chair.

Denvy's chest rose with the intake of breath and his mouth fell into a hard line as he watched Simone, seemingly dismayed by her attitude before he looked back to Eleanor with his same plaid face. "Eleanor, what do you think about after the incident in the safari zone?"

Eleanor shifted up in her seat, wrapping her arms around her eevee and grabbing onto her own elbows. "I think about him coming back."

"So how did the alert that happened last week make you feel?" Denvy asked.

"Terrified," Eleanor muttered. "I don't understand why he came after Wallace, or me. We didn't do anything and it's like he's targeting us," Eleanor said before she moved up in the row and looked down the line. "Wallace, do you feel that way too?"

Wallace forced himself to make eye contact with the blue-eyed girl behind her glasses and for a brief moment, the uneasy rumbling in his gut faded. For the first time he looked at more than her bandage, to her hairy, thin and shiny under the schoolroom lights, it looked dirty like it hadn't been washed recently. A spot of puckered pink flesh stood out against the lines in her forehead as her brows knitted together. She looked scared and traumatized.

A hand falling on Wallace's shoulder snapped him out of his own head and when he looked up Denvy was standing over him, his face pinched in worry. "Are you okay?" Denvy asked.

Wallace nodded and wet his lips. "Yeah, I feel the same," he said, his gaze falling to his lap.

"Maybe the two of you could be a support group for each other," Denvy offered. "The report says it was the two of you who escaped from Chara and Wallace that lured you lured him away from Ben and Simone. That's very heroic."

As Denvy moved away, Wallace strained his mind trying to wrap the word _heroic_ around his actions. He hadn't been thinking about leading Chara away from Ben or Simone, he only wanted to get as far away from him as possible. By sheer luck, Chara had become more interested in him than he was about the others. Wallace was sure he'd read something about hunters enjoying the thrill of the hunt.

"Ben, you've been quiet. How has all of this affected you?" Denvy asked as he took his seat again.

Ben shrugged as he massaged the tips of his eevee's ears. "I thought Chara was pretty cool when she was a girl or was pretending to be one. She said she was going to lead us to a rare pokémon. My best friend back home told me to open up more and I'll make friends easily, so I tried not to think about it when Chara came to us. I'd just met Simone and Dirk and everything seemed to be going well."

"Dirk was the boy who died," Denvy said, scanning the faces of the group.

"Yup," Simone quipped, her stare fixed on the table.

"But then he hit me," Ben said, his voice shaking. "I was asking Simone something and then it felt like my head was going to explode. I remember seeing a knife and hearing screaming, and Dirk falling, gasping for air. That was it."

"Mr. DeHaan," Mieko said, her airy voice taking the room by surprise, Wallace had almost forgotten she was there. "It's time."

Denvy clapped his hands together again as he stood. "Unfortunately we'll have to cut this meeting short. Because of the alert and having to reschedule I could only book this room before the next class is scheduled to start. But I'd like to see you all here next Monday, same time, if not sooner at my office."

Wallace stood uneasily, holding the egg with uncertainty as he waited for Denvy's punchline to arrive and for the man to take the egg back, but after watching the others depart and Denvy wave goodbye, leading Mieko away, he realized the joke was on him.

* * *

After heading back to the ICO from the meeting, Wallace made a bed of sheets for the egg to rest on and let elgyem and spinarak observe it while he showered. After letting the water, that never seemed hot enough, scald him, Wallace stayed under the water, letting the stream land on his shoulders for minutes at a time. The hard pelt of water gushing from the head provided small relief to the ever growing ache in his muscles as a result of all the physical work he'd done in the last week.

After shutting off the water Wallace did his usual routine of checking the scars on his back in the mirror while he brushed his teeth before he headed back to his room. As he finished drying off and dressed, Wallace noted the small things moved around on Garret's side. He'd been back to the room, no doubt a short trip to avoid running into him.

With a relenting sigh, Wallace booted up his laptop to start on a reading assignment and quiz about electrical waves and their effect on evolution when someone knocked on his door.

"Coming," he called as he crossed the room. The moment he turned the knob the door flew open and Arlette stormed in, her white-blonde hair flying out wildly behind her. Stunned, Wallace's mouth fell open, his hand still turned on the knob. "A-Arlette?"

The small girl's chest was rising and falling as if she couldn't get enough air, her sunken in cheeks puffing out every few seconds. She uncoiled an arm from her side and her bag fell to the floor. Her head craned to the side as she saw Garret's television on the dresser. She moved towards it like a magnet and turned it on, flipping manually through the channels before she stopped on a news broadcast.

Stepping back, she palmed her face, trying to clear away her hair that fell across half her face, the one eye Wallace could see was wide and trained on him.

Wallace had to tear himself away from her to pay attention to the news report, an anchor, a female, and not one he recognized was sitting at a desk before a nondescript blue wall. He jammed at the volume button until the sound of the report filled his room.

" – the circumstances, the search for Andrew Gates continues. This morning in Lumiose City a resident on Estival Avenue reported to officials with information she claimed to have for the night that 19-year-old Andrew is believed to have gone missing. Stefani Richmond has lived in Lumiose all her life and often spends her time stargazing and taking pictures of the moon. That was how, Stefani said, she managed to snap this picture."

The anchor nodded to the camera and a rectangle appeared above her shoulder, a vibrant red picture filling it seconds later.

"It may be hard to tell what we're looking at exactly, but Stefani claims to have taken the picture shortly after hearing sirens around her home, sirens heading to the home of Arlan Pearce who was the victim of a break-in that night. Stefani said after hearing officers voices she looked out her window in time to see someone sprinting past her building and managed to capture a picture of them." The anchor was covered as the picture was blown up.

Even on Garret's small television Wallace could make out the scene in the picture clearly. Connecting alleyways around his house, a figure darting out from the safety of a wall, their body lit up by the bright red light of a Poké Ball opening. He knew it well. Wallace could feel his stomach shriveling and bile bubbling up his throat as he stared at himself on screen, his face turned and perfectly illuminated by the light of a pursuing officer's ball.

"No leads on just who this individual is, or what connection they may have to the disappearance of Andrew Gates or the break-in at the Pearce home, but a reward is being offered to anyone who comes forth with information about this individual as he is wanted for questioning."

Wallace watched as the anchor opened her mouth to speak again, but the television cut off as Arlette hit the button. Despite the picture being gone, the image had seared itself into his mind, it was dark, but the light from the ball releasing lit him up perfectly. But they wouldn't connect the picture to Wallace Pearce, his father's statement put him out of the region at the time. And his features; his face, void of glasses, his hair, long and light in the red glow, none of it matched Wallace Peters. He assured himself no one would be able to make the connection unless they'd seen him prior.

The thought struck him like a hammer striking a nail. Fast, hard, and with direct precision. Feeling faded from his body as he turned, his legs moving out of sync with one another and he nearly hit the floor. His skin felt cold and clammy, despite it feeling like a fire had been lit just beneath his skull.

Arlette was breathing heavily again, a strand of her hair flying up from her nose as she exhaled. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides as her mouth quivered open. "Who are you?"

* * *

End of Chapter Fourteen

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ New characters~ **Professor Chase McCloud** by **ShadedLyht** and **Mieko Chikage** by **ChibiMuffehnz27.** Denvy belongs to me.

Thank you all for your reviews and messages and your feedback on Wallace and the story, it's all appreciated!

 **Question of the Chapter #13:** Do you think Arlette poses a threat to Wallace and his secret?


	15. Dear Diary

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Fifteen – Dear Diary**

 _I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,  
_ _for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

"Who are you?"

It wasn't loud, but Arlette's voice still filled the room and rang through his ears like a shot.

"Arlette." The sound of his own voice, breathy and wet with emotion, startled Wallace. His skin raised into bumps as a slow gripping chill, like water freezing over, spread across his shoulder blades. He grabbed at his abdomen that clenched as if he'd just been socked in the stomach. His hand trembled as he raised it to her. "Arlette... please," he said, his words coming between intakes of air through his mouth.

"Who are you?" That time it was loud, her voice modulating, her whole body moving forward with the force of her question. "Y-You know him? You knew him? Who, w-who are you?"

Andrew's name dried up on his tongue and he swallowed it down. "Arlette, let me... let me explain. Okay?" he said, his ragged breathing worsening as he stepped towards her.

Arlette backed away from him and when he made another effort to reach her she slipped away and rushed to the door. She managed to get the door open before Wallace pushed into the wood. The door slammed shut, the sound resonating across the room, Arlette's hands still twisted around the knob, a pained look on her face as Wallace stared down at her.

"Stop, just let me explain," he said, his voice nothing more than a rasp.

"Let me go," she whined, their faces just inches apart, as she tugged at the door again.

"Arlette, just stop!"

Wallace adjusted his weight to grab her and in that instant Arlette yanked the door open, the edge beaming Wallace on the side of his head. He staggered back, his hands around Arlette's wrists and pulled her back with him, their scuffle visible to anyone who might pass by the room.

Dropping to the floor, Wallace pulled a struggling Arlette with him just as she opened her mouth to scream. Pressing forward he knocked her off her feet, her impact against the floor enough to silence her as he slid across the floor, the skin on her wrists warming from the friction as he worked around her.

Glancing back, Wallace let go of one of her hands as he stretched out his legs and kicked his door shut, another loud boom through the room, and when he turned back he felt a sensation of fire rake down his neck.

He cried out, his hands leaving Arlette to cup his neck. Though his hands left his neck without a trace of blood, the pain still radiated through his throat.

Arlette's hand was still clawed, her short, but efficient nails aimed at him before she scurried back and got to her feet, panting.

"Arlette!" Wallace yelled as she ran for the door. He heard her hands fiddling with the knob before he listened to the lock turn and the door swing open. "Arlette, come back!"

Turning, he saw her back vanish into the hall as he scrambled to his feet and threw himself into the doorway. "Arlette, don't leave!" He scanned the hallway, several doors were opening around him, inquisitive faces peering out from their rooms. Wallace paid them no mind before he turned down the other end and saw Arlette's grey hoodie as she sprinted down the hall, heading for the back stairwell.

Yanking his door shut Wallace ran after her, trying to make it look casual as he passed his hall-mates, their whispers starting up around him before he broke into a full sprint at the sight of Arlette ducking into the stairwell.

Sliding into the back stairwell not long after her, Wallace saw the top of her head as she climbed down the boxed set of stairs that would lead them all the way to the first floor. Wallace took the stairs quickly, tripping over his bare feet and often sliding against the edge of a step or missing one entirely, his pace quickening as Arlette reached the bottom and he heard the door open to the outside.

"Arlette!" he said, his voice hollering back at him, an echo from the concrete walls.

Reaching the bottom, Wallace slammed the door and scanned his surroundings. He stumbled out into the back courtyard of the ICO, nothing but a flat stretch of grass with sunbathing chairs and newly planted free, and nowhere to hide. With a glance to the left exit of the courtyard he saw Arlette, her body bent over and pressed against one of the gated walls that surrounded the trash and recycling area for their dorm.

In the seconds their eyes locked Wallace knew she saw his intentions and before he had to head in her direction she was off again. Wallace followed, his feet pounding across grass, brick, and stone as he followed her significantly smaller strides around the ICO, across the turnaround lot, and around the side of Rose-Absolute Hall.

Wallace saw Arlette falter once she reached the crossing towards the Origin Center, but veered left instead and vanished into a stone edifice that connected the dorm to Myrrh Hall. Wallace followed, his feet scraping against the rough stone before he darted into the grass outside the dorm while Arlette followed the stone path that led into a circular plaza that broke off into many different paths.

Wallace headed straight for her as she broke from the path and ran into the grass, headed towards Neroli Hall, their paths colliding in the middle of the lawn.

He plowed into her, his arms wrapping around her waist as he knocked her off her feet. With a high yelp, Arlette hit the ground on her back, her hair tangled across her face. Forcing his hands down onto her shoulders Wallace tried to pin Arlette down, but once she made another effort to scratch him Wallace shifted back, his weight falling off her.

Arlette rolled over and scrambled to her feet, her hand falling to her waist just as Wallace reached out for her. He didn't hear her, but saw her head turn and mouth open in a cry before a light blinded him.

Something struck the ground before him, his hand missed Arlette and landed on something hard, the pads of fingers scraping against rough skin that reminded him of scales. As the throbbing just behind his eyes faded, Wallace blinked up to see blood red scales leading down to a dark yellow underbelly and then to two massive and powerful looking clawed feet standing before him. Trailing his eyes back up he found spikes, sharp claws, fins, and a pointed head with torpedo-like protrusions staring at him, all fixed around a large mouth with rows of teeth that looked eager to rip into him.

"Garr!"

A deep bellow and the rancid smell of rot blew into his face from the maw of the creature before him. Wallace shifted back and started to scurry away from the pokémon that progressed on him, a thick dangerous looking tail swinging behind it.

"A-A-Arlette," he muttered, his entire body prickled with fear. A wet patch of grass soaked through his shorts and for a moment he thought he'd wet himself.

Wallace kept scooting back, afraid to stand before the pokémon that continued to progress on him. For a split second, a flash of white crossed his mind and he saw Eleanor's arcanine, its massive and threatening body advancing on Chara. The thought of teeth like knives cutting through him froze Wallace and his arms gave out, his back slamming onto the grass he fell back.

"Elroy," Arlette said, her meek form appearing beside the pokémon. She gripped the pokémon's sides before she hoisted herself onto its back, the pokémon bending over as she settled herself behind the large fin on its back, gripping it for support.

Wallace felt his throat cinch shut as Arlette rode the pokémon closer, its face craning down to him as the slits on its snout, marked by a yellow star-like spot, opened and closed as it took in his scent, which Wallace had to guess smelled like fear.

A beam of light scythed in the dark, cutting across the lawn before the glow caught the pokémon's attention. "Garr!" it growled.

"Elroy, let's go," Arlette whispered.

Wallace watched her give a soft kick to the pokémon's hind legs before it trounced off, its heavy footfalls thundering across the soft grass before the two of them vanished behind Wallace, back the way they came.

Thoughts of getting off the grass flooded Wallace's brain as the light made sweeping motions across the grass, nearing closer to him with each swing. Slowly, different parts of his body started to move. HIs foot twanged, his fingers dug into the dirt as he curled his fists together. His stomach churned with a sickening feeling that filled the back of his throat and Wallace rolled over in time for the contents of his stomach to spew from his mouth.

The flashlight swung around again, the light passing over him for a second before it swung back and blinded him. He heard someone gasp: "Oh!"

Even once he was sure nothing else was coming up, Wallace stayed there on all fours, exhausted and heaving as wet hot matter dangled from his lips into wet mounds in the grass, the sound squelching over the hammering of his heart. The feeling of needles pricked every inch of his skin as if his entire body had dulled itself in preparation for death and was slowly rebooting, every ounce of sensation hitting him at once.

"Wallace?"

A body fell down into the grass beside him and hands landed on his back, rubbing in circles. "Are you okay? It's me, Don. What happened?"

The last of his body snap back seemed to be his nose. As Wallace hung over his excretions the smell burned his nostril, but triggered something in the back of his mind. The dark lawn of the university was gone and he saw a muddy bank, his hands, his own small hands, clawed into the mud. The scene was so vivid and unexpected he actually flinched and felt Don's hand slide up to his shoulder. Like the twinkle of fireworks against the night sky, images flashed before him: the gruff voices of adults around him, the crisp uniform of officers, the slushy water of a river, and then his father was there, standing beside Charles. Carrie was at eye level with him, one hand on his shoulder, the other clutching Andrew's back, her son crying into her chest.

When the memories faded he was up, his legs wobbling beneath him as he was led towards the dorm. The doors of Rose-Absolute Hall opening before him and someone, Don, guiding him inside. He heard the sound of a zipper before soft fabric was pushed into his hands.

"Change into this," Don said, again guiding him across the small lobby and into a small connecting hall that held a bathroom and three vending machines.

Staggering into the bathroom Wallace found his starting reflection in the mirror. His eyes were an irritated red and his cheeks were slick with the salty taste of tears. He looked into his hands at what Don had given him, a maroon jacket. The soft cotton was a relief to his hands after the cold and wet grass. Wallace looked to his shirt, the center of his cold and weighing against his stomach when he noticed a patch where his vomit had landed.

He laid Don's jacket on the sink and folded up the bottom of his shirt before he pulled it off. He sunk it into the trash can beside the toilet before his eyes fell the red lines that started just below his chin and stopped above his collarbone. Moving his hand like Arlette's, he traced the lines of his scratches before he saw something shift outside the bathroom. Don was still there, standing just a foot outside the door. Their eyes met for a moment before Don darted out of sight.

He didn't bother to close the door, instead he washed his and his face, gargled water to clear the acid taste from his mouth and zipped Don's jacket up around him. When he left, Don was waiting for him in the lobby. "I got you something to drink," he said and pulled open one of the wood and glass doors that led into a large lounge.

Wallace slowly walked into a large and two-tiered room with a dark wood and carpeted floors and beige walls. High and low wooden tables were set up around the room with bright yellow stools pushed into them. Don ushered him to a set of four large white leather armchairs around a coffee table. A clear plastic cup of water was sitting in front of one of the chairs and Wallace took it as his invitation to sit.

"I told Azalea what happened," Don said, taking his seat beside Wallace.

Wallace took a small sip of the water, his eyes rising to the opposite side of the room where a compact coffee shop had been set up. Azalea, the girl from Andrew's birthday party, stood behind a wooden counter with black tops, amid different machines, bouncing around to music that seemed to be emanating from the shop.

"Are you okay?" Don asked.

"Fine," Wallace managed to say around sips.

"What were you doing out there," Don asked as he pulled his legs into the chair.

Wallace glanced at him, looking eager for his answer like he was about to tell him a story. "Throwing up," he said dryly. "You?"

"Checking on some new buds I planted last week," Don said and held out his hands.

Wallace saw lines of dirt beneath his nails and nodded before he went back to water, the cool and crisp taste slowly clearing the burn from his throat.

"I thought I saw something else out there with you." Don looked to his hands and picked at his nails.

Briefly, he thought about what telling him about Arlette could accomplish. Surely harassing a student the day she returned to school after being taken away by the police wouldn't sit well with the university, but would that push her over the edge to tell someone she saw him on the news? If she hadn't already. The thought that she might have headed to public safety made his head throb, he imagined the officers readying themselves to come speak to him, maybe Detective Fujioka would be the one to take him away.

He stood and walked slowly, his legs still felt weak, and walked around the upper level of the lounge. Through the side door, he could see clearly onto the lawn courtesy of the lounge's lighting. He didn't see anyone outside, no men in uniforms mounted on pokémon the way Arlette had mounted, whatever the scaled pokémon had been.

"Wallace, I know we don't really know each other, and I know I keep asking this, but are you okay?" Don asked, his feet thudding across the wooden floor. "I can help if something is wrong."

Wallace pushed against the bar of the back door and gave a little test shove. The door was heavy to open, a quick escape was out of the question, but the alternative was leaving through the main door and out of the lobby. Too many doors and seconds wasted, he thought. He pressed his forehead to the door, the cold glass cooling him as thoughts of another fleeing scene filled his mind.

The door to the lounge opened and Wallace craned his neck around, waiting for an officer to walk through, instead, Kolton stepped through the doorway. Relief flooded his chest with cooling sensation; he found himself smiling uncontrollably and even let out a soft laugh. Kolton turned to him and grimaced.

"Kol, hey, what's up?" Don asked, looking his roommate and Wallace.

"Just wondering what was taking so long," Kolton said, his eyes only straying from Wallace for a second. "I didn't think it was safe to be out at night."

"I was on my way back and ran into Wallace," Don said warily, apparently not blind to the silent war raging between the two of them.

"We should get to sleep, we have to present our project to Professor Stratton tomorrow morning," Kolton said. "Equal participation or we both fail it, remember."

"I know," Don said with a sigh before he turned back to Wallace. "Are you going to be alright, Wallace?"

"Fine," he said before he moved back to the chair and took his seat. "I'll finish my water and then head back. You don't need to worry about me."

"Alright, well have a good night."

Wallace watched the two of them leave before he curled up in the armchair, nursing his cup of water. He took to watching Azalea as small waves of customers visited the shop. After finishing a drink she called out their orders and had them collect from a small gate on the side of the shop, but once the line picked up Azalea released her pancham, who carried drinks to the waiting students.

While listening to Azalea sing along to the music in the shop he must have fallen asleep because when he awoke the lounge was slightly darker, the lights above the shop off and a sliding gate pulled shut. A chill in the lounge made him bury himself deeper into Don's jacket that smelled slightly of floral perfume and dirt. He knew he should head back, check on elgyem, spinarak, and his egg, but the leather of the chair had warmed to his body and it was all he needed to be lulled back to sleep.

* * *

 _As he broke through the trees Wallace was greeted by the sound of water gurgling over rocks and churning into white froth. A few yards of grass and mud separated him from a wide river, the biggest he'd ever seen. A series of small drops formed baby waterfalls down the river's length before it fell to shallows._

 _Fallen trees had landed in the river, stopping the current and making a small pool near the bank. A larger tree had fallen and connected the two banks. Split in the middle, the tree created V over the pool in the river and Wallace found Andrew there. He stood, hands pressed to his hips in a triumphant stance as if he had knocked the tree down and was waiting for someone to witness his strength._

" _Wally! Told you there was a river we could cross!" Andrew shouted over the sound of the water. "C'mon you bum, there's rare pokémon just waiting for us on the other side."_

" _How do you know?" Wallace asked as he stepped gingerly across the mud. He watched his feet sink a few inches into the mud and knew his father was going to be mad his new shoes were dirty._

" _Because I know," Andrew said with a shrug before he turned and started walking back and forth across the tree, arms out for balance. "Pinky Pie can feel it too!"_

 _As Wallace approached the roots of the fallen tree that looked fitting enough for steps up to the tree, he saw Andrew turn and his mother's spritzee waving from his back. "Is Pinky an expert on tracking?" he asked._

" _Better than you," Andrew fired back as he did a little dance on the trunk._

 _Wallace laughed as he found handholds and climbed the roots until he was climbing onto the trunk. As he rose to his feet he wondered how Andrew was making it look so easy. The trunk was slippery with frost. Every careless step Andrew made sent Wallace into high alert as the tree jostled. "This is dangerous," he said._

 _Andrew balled his fists up in front of his eyes and turned them as if he were turning the knobs of a faucet. "Crybaby, crybaby."_

" _I'm not crying!" Wallace felt his face warming as he dared a few more steps on the trunk._

" _Crybaby, crybaby," Andrew sang as he jumped up and down on the tree._

" _Spri, spri!"_

 _Wallace's foot slipped against dented part of the trunk and his leg flew out from under him. His body twisted with his leg and before he knew it he the trunk hard on his bottom, the impact vibrating up his spine. "OW!" he cried. "You did that on purpose!" Wallace scratched at the trunk and swung his leg back over, straddling the tree._

" _How did I make you fall?" Andrew doubled over in laughter, clutching his stomach. "You should have seen your face, it was – oh."_

 _Wallace tipped his head up to see Andrew standing up straight, his eyes fixed on something on the shore. Icy cold fingers walked down his spine as Wallace feared his father might be waiting on the shore, arms crossed and face red with anger. Heart pounding, he shifted on the trunk before turned and saw something much worse waiting for them on the bank._

* * *

One moment he was asleep, the memory of claws and fangs fresh in his mind, before he vaulted into consciousness at a loud slamming sound. The sound sent him on alert and his gripped at bedding around him, the soft and plush fabric a surprise considering he fell asleep in a leather chair. The sight of sunlight beat through an adjacent window was when he wasn't in the lounge anymore. And the sight of the window against a different wall, not above his bed, was when he realized he wasn't in his own bed.

"Oh, you're up."

Wallace scooted up in the bed, kicking away a purple sheet as he saw Kolton standing across the room in front of a dresser. Looking around he realized based on the door, the walls, and the tiled floor he was in a dorm.

Kolton stood before the room's dresser and combed at his bright red hair, attempting to tame a wild curl. "I don't know why he brought you back here."

"Who?" Wallace asked as he scooted to the edge of the bed and swung his legs out, nearly stepping on the body splayed out on the floor. Don was laid out on the floor, snoring softly, his limbs sticking out in odd places as if he'd been dumped on the floor.

"Don was worried about you and said when he went to check on you, you were asleep in the lounge," Kolton said. "He didn't want to leave you there so he carried you back and put you in his bed."

"Why?" he asked, stepping gingerly over the boy. Against the opposite wall he could see himself in the mirror Kolton was using. He rubbed at his face and adjusted Don's jacket that seemed to have come unzipped during the night.

"Well you weren't sleeping in my bed," Kolton said with a scoff as he went back to grooming himself.

"I mean, why does he care so much?" Wallace asked, scanning the room for his shoes before he realized he'd been barefoot.

"That's just who he is," Kolton said.

Scanning the room, Wallace stumbled on Don's desk, supplied by the university, that sat the foot of his bed and was littered on top with a mortar and pestle along with different types of flowers and berries gathered in neat piles. Several notebooks were stacked together beside a framed picture. In the photo Wallace quickly found Don and Cosmo, both looking incredibly uncomfortable to be posing while they stood in front of their brother Nat. Beside them he saw two others he didn't recognize, a blonde girl and a tall boy with a head full of brown curls.

The sound of Kolton clearing his throat snapped Wallace out of staring at the picture. "So, he slept on the floor?" Wallace stood up and rubbed his hand over his hair, trying to play off his curiosity.

"No, he stayed up for a bit watching you," Kolton said. "But when I woke up for class he was sleeping beside you. He wouldn't get up, he missed our presentation and we failed. Thanks for that."

Wallace worked his shoulders in a circle, feeling stiff and slightly uncomfortable at the idea of Don carrying him to bed and then sleeping beside him.

"I don't hate you, if that's what you're thinking," Kolton said as he finished at the mirror and moved towards the door.

"It wasn't," Wallace said. "I've got more on my mind than what you think of me."

Kolton shrugged before he left, slamming the door behind him. Wallace flinched, sure it would wake Don, but the boy continued to snore, dead to the world.

Wallace spent the next several minutes in uncomfortable silence, like the first person to wake up at a sleep over. He paced the room in silence, wondering if he should wake Don, put him back in his bed, or at the very least throw a blanket on him, but even looking at Don made him feel something he wasn't able to put into words or a single solid thought.

Opting for the coward's path, he made his way to the door and twisted the knob slowly, despite Don already sleeping through Kolton's reckless actions. Just when he had the door opened a crack something slammed into from outside and threw him back across the room.

"Bella!" Nat burst into the room with enough fanfare to be his own parade. "I heard ya skipped – oh, hello. What's going on here?" he asked, his arms folding over his chest. "Walk of shame, party of one?"

Wallace froze when he heard a shifting on the ground and a squeak of a yawn as Don rose. "Mm, Na – Nasty? What are you doing here?" Don asked, his voice heavy with sleep.

"Nasty?" Nat's jaw dropped and his arms flew out, his hands balled into fists. "Did you just call me Nasty?"

Wallace looked to Don who was slowly sitting up and rubbing his eyes and then to Nat who's face was growing red. "I should really go," he said, inching for the door.

"Yeah, ya really should." Nat eyed Wallace as he made his way to the door. "I'll deal with you later."

As Wallace slipped into the hallway he watched Nat step closer to Don and hover over him, his hulking frame intimating the boy on the ground. Before the door was closed he saw Don lock eyes with him and a look of surprise cross his features.

* * *

Leaving Rose-Absolute Hall, Wallace got a glimpse at a clock in the lobby. It was just after eleven and he'd missed his first three classes for the day, still he rushed back to the ICO only to be locked out when he realized he'd left, chasing after Arlette, without his ID.

He waited outside, earning curious looks from passing students before another first-year let him in the building and made a beeline for his room. He knew he hadn't wasted time on locking the door before chasing Arlette, so finding it unlocked still didn't surprise him as he turned the knob, but finding Garret on his bed did.

Wallace jolted back at the shock and Garret shot up from the bed, his hand still lingering towards the center where he'd left the egg from Denvy in its nest of blankets.

"S-Sorry, I was just – I saw the egg. I just wanted –"

Wallace held a hand up to him as elgyem came floating across the room. Wallace embraced him in a hug before he saw spinarak scurrying towards him from a complex series of webs across the ceiling. He let spinarak make his way down to the top of his head before he moved across the room, he and Garret moving like magnets of similar attraction.

He stopped by Garret's desk, an arrangement of torn up paper pieces fixed together on top. He recognized the blocky lettering immediately, it was the letter Izumi had found on the door and that he'd torn up and tossed in Garret's trash.

His arm twitched as he resisted the urge to sweep his hand across the desk and send the paper scraps flying, but Garret came to his side, looking over the assembled note. "Is it about Chara?" he asked.

"It's nothing," he said and then he did sweep his hand across the desk, gathering the pieces in his palm before he dumped them back into Garret's trash. "Forget about it." He moved around Garret and back towards his bed. The egg was still and elgyem and spinarak went towards it, hovering around it as if it was theirs.

"Your bag was in the floor, I put it on your bed," Garret said quickly before Wallace heard him crossing the room and flying out of the door.

He rolled his eyes and took a deep breath before his eyes fell onto a frumpy and dingy colored bag sitting on his pillow. Moving to the end of his bed, Wallace found the bag he'd bought from the bookstore sitting at the foot of his bed and even checked his closest. The duffel was still there, partially hidden under dirty clothes. "That's not mine," he said to the empty room as he studied the shape of the bag and instantly recalled hearing it hitting the floor when Arlette dropped it off her arm.

" _Did you know him, Andrew?" Wallace asked, his voice tight._

 _Tempest softly shook her head before she crossed her arms over her chest. "But Arlette is always writing in her journals, I'm sure there must be pages dedicated to him."_

Without a thought or a beat of hesitation, Wallace attacked Arlette's bag. He tore open the drawstring top and began rifling through it before he turned the bag over and dumped the contents on his bed, startling elgyem. Loose papers, notebooks, folders, pencils, books, and a few bags of pokémon food fell out and Wallace spread it out before him, his hands running over each of the books carefully. Two were textbooks, but the other was a thin leather bound book with a cheap looking clasp on the front.

Testing the clasp, a wave of nausea hit him as the buckle came away with ease. Starting from the back Wallace saw not many pages were filled, but the closer he got to the front of the book he started to see drawing doodles and words written across the lined pages. Wallace flipped to the front and fingered through a few random blank pages before he found the first entry in the book.

* * *

 _October 14_ _th_ _–_ _Goodbye_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I've said goodbye_ _to a lot of things._

 _I said goodbye to my mom five years ago._

 _I said goodbye to my_ _dad_ _four months ago._

 _I_ _said goodbye to my childhood home this morning._

…

 _Things were hard for_ _me and my dad after mom passed and now that he's gone too there's no way for me to stay in_ _our home._ _I've_ _lived here_ _my entire life. 15 is too young for a girl to be a homeless orphan._

 _My mom gave me this diary for my_ _9_ _th_ _birthday, but I never_ _thought_ _I'd have a reason to write in it. Even after my parents passed it never crossed my mind._ _But here I am. My dad had just enough money_ _saved up to pay our bills_ _for a few more months,_ _but_ _today is it._

 _A family friend offered to take me in, bu_ _t I can't stay in Camphrier right now._ _Too many memories._

 _Too many goodbyes..._

 _I_ _was able to do little jobs around Camphrier, and between that and finding money on the streets, I had_ _enough to get me started on a journey._ _It wasn't much, just enough to buy a single Poké Ball_ _really._ _I caught an Espurr the other day. He likes his new name, Bleu._

 _So today_ _is the day I decided to start writing_ _. The day I say goodbye to the last physical reminder of my childhood._ _I'm nervous about what my life will be like._ _I_ _worry_ _that I've been passed up for all of life's enjoyment._

 _I don't know that I've_ _ever had a true friend. I'm not any different from other girls, just quieter. I_ _guess_ _when everyone else is loud and full of energy, being the girl that sits to the side and doesn't say a word doesn't make you stand out._

 _I've dreamed about having friends. About what it would be like to talk to them for hours, to be invited to parties, to explore Kalos_ _with them_ _. I want friends to drag me along to go shopping, to listen to music with, to share books with, to trade diaries, to dance in the rain,_ _stay up late with,_ _and to talk to about boys._

 _I suppose I should write about Drew now._

 _Andrew Gates_

 _I am the quiet girl who stands to the side, but when I write I can break through that_ _which is maybe why Drew likes writing me letters and_ _why_ _I like writing back. I met Drew when I was 10. Drew was 10 too, and a_ _p_ _okémon trainer, and like every other trainer he was just visiting Camphrier Town. Lots of people come through Camphrier, but without a gym to challenge, they leave quickly. Camphrier, like me, is quiet and sits to the side._

 _I was sitting at the fountain in the center of town and accidentally fell in. Everyone laughed at me, but it was scary. The water was cold and the fountain was deeper than it looked. I flailed around like a 'karp, but I couldn't get out. Drew came then, he held his hands out for me to grab, but I managed to pull him in too. He wasn't upset or anything, he thought it was funny and even though he was in the same boat as me he helped me get out first._ _He lent me his jacket and walked me home._ _By the time we reached my house it dawned on me that I hadn't said a single word to him the entire time, not even thank you. It was like I couldn't speak at all. I went to give him his jacket back, but he told me to keep it and that he'd come back to see me sometime and he'd get it then._

 _He left his trainer ID in the jacket pocket. I used his ID to send him a letter, telling him thank you and that he_ _still needed to_ _come get his jacket. He wrote back and showed up at my house a day later. I managed to tell him thank you again, but I stuttered over my words, yes, I couldn't even get out two words without stammering!_

 _But again, he didn't laugh at me, or look at me like I was odd._ _He said he had to go, but asked if he could keep writing me letters. I said yes and that was the last time I saw him for a while._

 _Drew left to travel through Kalos, but we wrote each other several times a week. He told me about_ _his journey, that he'd been sponsored by Arlan Pearce, the_ _man_ _behind all the expensive trainer technology, all the things that my parents could never afford and_ _so_ _I never got to go on an adventure of my own._ _He told me he recorded his daily adventures through PokéView and invited me to watch, but like everything else Arlan Pearce created, we couldn't afford it. I told Drew that and so he started writing about what he did that day._

 _Stepped on a roggenrola._

 _Watched the sunrise._

 _Caught two claunchers._

 _Peed on a geodude._

 _Got chased by a graveler._

 _Those sort of things. Even half a region away he always kept me smiling. I tried to write back with things he might like. Poems, short stories, anything interesting that happened in my house, which wasn't very interesting at all, but Drew never complained. Drew didn't beat the Kalos league, but it didn't stop him. He was scheduled for a boat ride out of Coumarine City to head to the Kanto region the week following his loss at the League._

 _The unexpected happened then. Drew said he wanted to see me again and asked if I was able to go on a trip with him._ _N_ _o one, had ever asked me out_ _before_ _(I told myself this was a date, but never to his face)._ _He came back to Camphrier and_ _we headed for Route 14. Drew wanted to visit a haunted house deep in Route 14. My fear of all things scary and haunted was a secret to him and as much as I wanted to tell him, I was scared he'd be disappointed, so I kept quiet as we made our way_ _to_ _Route 14._

 _It wasn't a fun trip. We got rained on, our shoes got stuck in the mud, trainers constantly wanted to battle him, we got lost, and of course there was the haunted house that was actually an abandoned house. We learned that it was actually a tourist spot set up by Laverre City that had gone out of business years ago. But the entire trip was worth it when Drew kissed me. My first and to this day my only._

 _He held my hand as we made our way to Laverre and rested up before he flew me home. He was due to leave Kalos soon and the entire time_ _I waited for him to tell me we had to stop writing, but that never happened._ _Instead he said he wanted to see me again someday when he returned to Kalos. He wanted to get to know me better._

 _I save all his letters, but there's one I cherish more than the others. It came a few years ago, sent in the middle of the night. In it he talks about all the things he's seen on his adventure, all the sights he wanted to share with me. He said he can't wait to see me again. He said he wanted to travel with me, to open me up to the world, to make me smile, to see my wild side. I don't know if I have a wild side, but Drew thinks I do, so maybe I do, somewhere..._

 _I haven't seen him since our trip to Route 14, but_ _Drew and I continue to_ _write letters_ _to this day. In fact, diary, I think after I finish writing here I'll respond to Drew's latest letter._ _And after that I'll leave Camphrier to start my Pokémon journey. I think my reason for writing today is that although I've said goodbye to many things in my life and I'll probably say many more goodbyes after today. Andrew Gates is someone I_ _'ll never_ _say goodbye to._

 _Earnestly Yours, Arlette B._

* * *

End of Chapter Fifteen

* * *

 ** _AN:_** Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!

 **Question of the Chapter #14:** Do you think Arlette will tell anyone what she found out about Wallace?


	16. Roses, Roses

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Sixteen – Roses, Roses**

 _And time yet for a hundred indecisions  
_ _And for a hundred visions and revisions – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

 _August 7th –_ _Homecoming_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _Today I got a letter today from_ _D_ _rew,_ _b_ _ut that's nothing new._ _(I can rhyme!)_ _Drew's letters have been coming daily for years. His birthday is Friday and he's finally coming back to Kalos,_ _it's been nine years!_ _That alone deserves an entry here, but I'm really happy because he said he's coming back a few days earlier than his_ _dad_ _expects him. He'll be here on Tuesday._

 _Why is he coming back early?_

 _Me._

 _Me._

 _Me._

 _Me._

 _Me._

 _Me!_

 _He said he wants to see me._

 _He wants t_ _o take another trip through Route 14. It's_ _known_ _as the Laverre Nature Trail now._

 _He told me not to reply to his letter, just to be ready to leave on Tuesday morning. I'm a ball of nerves right now. I can barely keep my hand steady enough to write! It's like riding on the back of a Gogoat that is running too fast. Suddenly everything is happening too fast. Part of me wishes I never opened his letter, only because now I feel sick to my stomach. I dreamt about this, the day I finally got to see him again, and now it's here. In a little more than 24 hours he'll be here. I'm happy, and nervous, and excited, and scared. I never got to watch his adventures on PokéView when we were kids. I can afford it now... kind of._ _Okay, not at all, but I decided to stop eating I could afford him. Not him, it... POKÉVIEW!_

 _Bu_ _t I'm just too... I don't know the word for it, maybe it's anxious. Too anxious to watch him, to hear his voice, maybe it's a fear of getting too close. Because I'm scared._

 _Scared that maybe_ _the person he is now isn't who I remember him to be. I don't think I've changed much from when he last saw me, but what if he has changed and who is he now doesn't like who I've always been?_

 _I have to start packing._

 _Anxiously Yours, Arlette B._

* * *

Wallace squinted against the unfiltered sunlight that pushed through the floor to ceiling windows and filled Hawthorn Library with artificial light, despite there being many light sources hanging from the library's ceiling, three floors up.

As Wallace reached the end of one of Arlette's diary entries he flicked his weary eyes to the computer screen before him and finished spell checking his essay.

Wallace rubbed at the inner corners of his eyes before he pinched the bridge of his nose in an effort to ward off sleep after a night spent taking notes on which of Arlette's entries mentioned Andrew. Wallace scrolled and looked over his essay about form changes and evolution for Professor Till before he clicked PRINT.

Yawning, Wallace rolled away from one of the rows of computers that were lined up in the back of the library's main floor, the same set up mirrored on the other side of the room. Through glass walls Wallace could see small classrooms and quiet study rooms that branched off from the computers were all occupied, all filled with students in the middle of classes and lectures.

In the center of the room, a large wooden circulation desk wrapped around itself while a mix of student and adult workers moved around the circular fixture, helping students who approached. While he waited for his print job to start, Wallace watched Simone leaning down against the desk, speaking with lots of hand gestures to Ben who sat in an office chair behind the desk.

Wallace turned in time with the _whirl_ of the printer as spinarak leaped off his shoulder and landed on top of the machine. Elgyem flashed the green lights on his hands and pointed to the printer as well as it began to spit out the first pages of his essay.

"It's printing," Wallace said, unsure how many of the mindless things he did at school elgyem would actually understand. "Spinarak, watch out." Wallace grabbed his bag from the floor and rummaged around inside before he pulled out Arlette's diary, handing the worn leather covering with care.

He reached for the lid of the printer as spinarak scuttled off onto the paper tray, hopping up every time a new page came sliding out of the printer. Opening the book, Wallace spread the pages open across the glassy surface of the copier and held the lid down as he started to copy.

After reading the first entry in Arlette's diary, and then re-reading it the next morning, Wallace was equally entranced by the curled letters scrawled across the pages as he was afraid that every second he kept it would tempt Arlette to do something irrational. Returning it was a no-brainer, but after skimming future entries and finding Andrew's name highlighted and often haloed by poorly drawn hearts, returning it without reading all the tome had to offer seemed like an impossible task.

Once the sliding bar of the copier had reset to its original place, the entire machine working double time to print the page as well as finish the job of printing his essay, Wallace leafed through the diary and scanned again. He kept the cycle going until all of the pages he wanted to scan were queued to print before he tucked the diary back into his bag. Just as he buried the diary beneath several textbooks, the printer coughed out an odd jutting sound and the page in the middle of printing stopped halfway out of the machine.

Baffled, and a little scared, Wallace smacked the side of the printer before his page shot out, spinarak stomping down on it as if to claim it. Wallace gingerly pulled the page from under spinarak and saw one of his essay pages had printed a little smudged near the bottom. "Hey, Ben?" he called out. "I think the printer is jammed," he said, reading off a small dialogue screen on the face of the machine.

"Need some help?"

"Sure," Wallace said stepping aside, sure Ben had heard him, but someone else stepped up before the printer. He stood just a few inches above him with short brown hair in a burr cut. His skin was bronze, but as Wallace's eyes traveled up his arms he found pasty white flesh peeking out under the sleeve of his shirt. "Who're you?" he asked, his eyes darting under the stranger's arm to the catch tray filled with the assorted pages of his essay and the private thoughts of a lovesick girl.

"Johnny," he said as he stuck out his hand before he shrugged and his eyes rolled off towards the ceiling. "John, but please, Johnny. I work here. And go to school here," he added with a small laugh. "Student worker."

Wallace took his hand warily, still worried about his printed pages before he found the boy's eyes – pools of pale and golden browns shattered by flecks of blue-green – watching him with an intensity he could only assume was Johnny in an attempt to make a judgment call about him. "Wallace," he replied. "Sorry, I think broke the printer."

Johnny glanced down to their hands, still clenched together and bouncing pathetically in the air, as Wallace employed his father's rule of never being the first to end a handshake. Johnny's lips curled into a small smile before he pulled his hand back and turned to face the printer. "Don't worry, you're not the first person to overwork a printer, or so I hear. I just started a few weeks ago."

"Oh," Wallace said as he watched Johnny jab his thick fingers at the touch screen. "First year?" he asked as he moved around Johnny and grabbed his pages from the tray.

"Yup! You?" Johnny asked as he pulled a chain of keys from his pocket and unlocked a sliding plastic door on the printer's front, exposing wires and a control panel.

"Yeah," Wallace said, his mind wandering as he flipped through the printed pages, everything except his list of resources for his essay had printed just fine. Glancing down to Johnny, Wallace wondered if waiting for the last page was worth it. Turning his essay in without it was sure to piss Professor Till off who would bear down on him with claims that he'd plagiarized the essay, which, in all fairness, he had done, partially.

"I don't think we have any classes together," Johnny said as he popped up and moved around to the side of the printer and lifted the lid. "Then again, I don't really know too many people in my classes. I'm a front row guy myself, so I have no clue who sits behind me."

"Yeah," he said again, half listening as Johnny rambled on. Wallace took the opening while Johnny was bent over the printer to grab his bag and stuff his pages inside and sling the straps over his shoulder.

"Elgy," elgyem said, his stubby arm pointing to the printer.

Wallace followed the direction of his arm and found spinarak scaling the printer lid that was practically vertical. Before he could reach him, spinarak reached the top and skittered up Johnny's hand. The student worker gave a little gasp before he jumped back and eyed his hand.

"Hey there, fella," Johnny said as he cradled his hand to his chest and rubbed spinarak's head. "He yours?"

"Sorry about that, he's – nosy." Wallace held his hands out as Johnny carefully pried spinarak off his wrist and guided him into Wallace's hand.

"He's fine, I love bugs," Johnny said.

"Oh yeah?" Wallace asked as he spinarak, begrudgingly, climbed his arms and found a place to rest on his left shoulder. "I kind of stumbled onto him and caught him. Kind of an accident, but he's great," Wallace said as he looked to his shoulder.

Spinarak's eyes pinched shut as he clicked his mandibles and for a moment Wallace was sure he saw the face-like markings on spinarak's back curl into a smile.

"Anyway, uh, sorry about the printer, but I've got to go," Wallace said, taking a few steps back.

"You don't want your last page?" Johnny asked, pointing to the printer screen. "Says you've got one more page to print. I can get it out, won't take a second."

Wallace waved it off as he kept walking backward. "It's scrap, toss it."

* * *

After saying quick goodbyes to Ben and Simone, Wallace left the library and followed the stone path across campus and under the Bridge of Learning to the Origin Center. Entering a side door as he and Tempest usually did after their lunches, Wallace crossed the indoor arena to find Professor McCloud at the center of a small group of students, her booming voice carrying across the arena.

"I know you all want to fire off attacks and knock each other's pokémon around until the last man stands, but there's more to life than just battling," McCloud said. "So, today we'll be doing some review on the tests I had you take last week and I'll be handing back the results of your sparring sessions too."

As Wallace walked closer he saw Neo raise his hand. Wallace raised his brows and smirked at how easy Neo was to pick out, identified by the sleek piece of tech on his wrist. But Neo's voice didn't carry across the arena like the professor's as the room was filled with loud thumping music.

The students flinched under the thundering sound of a bass and cupped their ears as a screeching cry cut through the air.

"What the hell was that?" McCloud said, somehow louder than the music. "Somebody find out what that is!"

The students exchanged looks as the music died down a bit, still audible, but it was as if someone had realized how loud they'd started the track and dialed down to a reasonable volume.

"I mean it!" McCloud burst through the group of students and stormed off across the arena. "Whoever is doing that is disrupting my class and I won't start until I find out who's doing it. The later we start, the later you all leave!"

The threat of spending longer than an hour and a half with McCloud's bright and warm personality seemed to light a fire under the students as they broke apart and started looking around the arena. Even Wallace picked up his pace, deciding to check outside the arena as he headed off the track and past the small exercise unit.

Wallace's shoes squeaked against the freshly polished tile floor that led from the indoor track to the lobby as he followed the sound of a thumping drum track. As he rounded a large circulation desk that jutted out from the wall and connected from floor to ceiling, his eyes took in the sight of glass walls that looked into a room full of exercise equipment.

The longer he stared into the room the harder it became to tell how large it really was. Machines and areas filled with free weights were arranged in odd patterns across the black mat floor. The entire space was shown back at him by a wall made entirely of mirrors on the opposite side of the room that reflected a wall Wallace couldn't see, lined with more equipment and more mirrors that seemed to reflect back across the room infinitely.

Movement in the room garnered his attention and Wallace focused on a body attached to the back of a machine. He narrowed his eyes, at first unable to make out what was happening, but the longer he watched he saw a boy pulling down pieces of the equipment, one at a time, tall stacks of black weights lifting off the ground in tandem with his movements.

Wallace watched the shirtless back of the boy sitting on the machine, muscles tightening and taking definite shape beneath his skin as he pulled down on the machine's levers.

"We've been gone too long. McCloud is going to come looking for us."

Wallace could barely hear her voice over the music as a girl stepped out into view, a black tank top hanging loosely off her body, the sides of her bra visible in the gaps under her arms and a pair of tattered jean shorts snug against her thighs.

Despite only seeing her from the back, Wallace recognized her voice and her shining black bob haircut. "Persia," he said, not loud enough to be heard over the music.

The boy on the machine groaned as the weights came down to rest. "Just let me finish this rep," he said before he pulled down on the machine again with both arms.

Wallace watched Persia drop her head back before she spun around. She looked over one of the machines before she turned towards him and gasped, her body jerking back in fright. Wallace gasped too and straightened up when he bumped into someone and realized he wasn't the reason Persia gasped. Turning, Wallace saw most of the class had gathered behind him and Professor McCloud was storming into the weight room.

The boy on the machine shifted, staring forward into the mirrors as McCloud weaved through the maze of machines. The sight of her seemed to distract the boy from his weights as his arms went slack and the weights came crashing back down on the machine, the sound echoing through the room louder than the music.

Professor McCloud yanked at something by the wall and the music cut off. "Calvin," the professor yelled as she swung a cord around in her fist. "What kind of stunt are you trying to pull? The weight room is off limits to students during class hours unless supervised."

"Fine." The boy, Calvin, turned around on the machine and crossed his arms over his broad chest, stretching each arm out before he stood. "But you're the reason I ruined my set."

"Get out!" Professor McCloud commanded. Her arm snapped to the side as she pointed towards the door. "Both of you."

Persia ducked her head before she trounced out of the room, away from the professor's pique. Calvin followed her after he pulled a shirt off one of the machines and grabbed a book bag from the floor. He sauntered into the hallway, his brown hair, styled into a pompadour with shaved sides, shone with sweat under the lights. A bubble formed around him, the girls in the crowd fawning as he greeted them in passing with a smile.

Professor McCloud shut the lights off in the weight room before she left, a smirk on her face. Despite yelling she didn't seem upset as she led them up the steps, past the doors to the stadium balcony, and up another flight onto the second floor.

Wallace let himself fall to the back of the group as he took in the sight of a wide brick wall lined with plaques and team pictures of graduates of the university, dating far back in time until the pictures faded to black and white. The far side of the room was filled with black tables and chairs, arranged in a pattern fit for a large meeting.

Following along with the stragglers of his class Wallace found himself wrapping around the upper level that looked down over the indoor court until they filed into a classroom near where Xan held his classes.

As Wallace found a seat with Tempest he saw Persia and Calvin take seats in front of them, the former leaning across the aisle to talk to Calvin. "You're in a good mood today," she said.

Calvin eased down behind his desk, adjusted his shirt, the kind of form fitting athletic shirt Simone wore, and pulled his bag onto the desk. "I'm in a great mood today, and it's all because of a letter I got this morning," Calvin said as he whipped out an envelope. "Serena Saint-Mars gave it to me," he said, a sort of practiced apathy in his voice. "I'll open it, right after I finish my lunch," he added as he waved the letter around and pulled a wrapped sandwich out from his bag.

From behind, Wallace saw a large red spot used to seal the letter, pressed into it looked to be the shape of a flower. He'd seen his father mark letters the same way, using wax to seal the envelope before he would press the logo for Pearce Productions into it before it cooled.

"Serena Saint-Mars?" Neo turned around his seat and faced Calvin. He pushed his glasses further up on his face before he looked at his tablet. "Why am I hearing her name everywhere all of a sudden?"

"I heard she was just named the head of the Roses," Tempest said, though her attention wasn't focused on Neo.

"So? She's got no reason to pay attention to any of us freshman," Neo said, his eyes skipping over Wallace.

"You mean she's got no reason to pay attention to you," Persia quipped, her finger waggling at Neo.

"Shut up!" Neo barked back.

"Is she really so important?" Wallace asked. He vaguely remembered meeting Serena the night of the tournament after Don's win and the image that came to mind was her model walk across the balcony as she broke up the fight between Neo and Don's brother, Nat. He remembered staring a bit too long as she sashayed away, her raven hair catching every light and eye in the stadium. "And what are the Roses?"

Neo scoffed and Wallace looked forward in time to see him shaking his head, his lips spread in a smug smile. "Of course _you_ wouldn't know. If I have to repeat myself I will, but the Saint-Mars family is one of the most prominent and wealthy ones in the world. She's royalty here."

"It's true," Tempest added. "All the upperclass girls follow her everywhere. Boys too." Tempest said before she glanced to the front of the room. "McCloud's coming," she said in a harsh whisper.

Wallace looked over to see Calvin jolt in his seat before he began to take bigger bites of his slowly disappearing sandwich. Wallace could see his cheeks bulging with previous bites and he'd barely gotten half the sandwich gone when the professor stopped beside his desk.

"Calvin, now what are you doing?" she asked, wielding an armful of papers. "I have your test from last week over items that alter effectiveness in battle, a 27%! You should spend less time sneaking into the weight room or stuffing your face and more time reading the supplied material."

Calvin muttered a muffled reply through a mouthful food before Wallace watched the boy force himself to swallow. "I was exercising and I worked up an appetite," he said before he took another bite.

The professor fumed and clenched her fists in tight, her knuckles turning a ghostly white. "Don't just keep eating!" she seethed.

"But I'm hungry," Calvin mewled around another mouthful.

McCloud dropped the stack of test papers on Calvin's desk and rifled through them before she held a test on display. "This is your assessment of the sparring exercise we did in our first class, another failing grade, very disappointing. I wasn't impressed by your competitive attitude. In fact, because the class average for last week's test was so low I've asked some of the upperclassmen to volunteer their time to help you all study. They'll be here any second."

"Upperclassmen?" Tempest asked. "Bet Serena is one of them," she said, that time to Wallace.

Wallace scrunched up his face and shrugged. Despite Serena and her family being relevant at the university, he couldn't recall ever being a guest at something thrown by the Saint-Mars family, meaning they weren't high enough on his father's radar to warrant his attention.

From the corner of his eye, Wallace saw several figures stop outside of the classroom and one of them stepped through the doorway, brushing back her dark hair over her shoulder. "Are these the students in need of tutoring, Professor McCloud?"

Wallace's mouth fell into a hard line once he recognized Serena at the front of the pack. "Speak of the devil and she shall appear," he muttered, not unnoticed by Tempest who playfully slapped his arm.

"Yes, these are the underachievers," McCloud said as she slammed test after test onto the desktops of the students while she made her way to the front of the room.

Wallace could see stars shining in the eyes of the boys, and even some of the girls, as the upperclassmen filed in. There was an even distribution among the sex of the tutors and who they ended up with seemed to be decided by which underclassmen forced themselves onto the tutor first.

Persia and Calvin were silent as Serena stopped near their seats. She was dressed all in white, a pleated white skirt that stopped high on her thighs and a crisp white blouse with a large bow across her chest. Her hair spilled off her shoulder and onto Calvin's desk in an act of unplanned perfection as she leaned over towards him.

"What do you two need help with?" she asked as she hovered over the desks. "A 27% huh? Hmm, guess we'll start with effectiveness. Sound good?"

"Yuh...yuh...yes," Persia stammered.

"Thanks, Serena," Calvin said cooly and gently nudged Persia's leg. "I'm Calvin Thompson, and this is Persia. You left a letter in my mailbox this morning?"

Serena smiled, her eyes narrowing on Calvin before she straightened up looked to the ceiling. "Oh, did I?"

Wallace couldn't help but grin when he saw the muscles in Calvin's shoulders and back tense up at Serena's cool dismissal.

"What? Did you not mean to?" Calvin asked, fumbling for the letter. "It's addressed to me, and everyone knows you're in charge of the Roses now."

"Miss. Saint-Mars! Could you come here for a second? I have to show you something," McCloud asked from the front of the room.

"Here I come," Serena said with a smile over her shoulder.

"What about my letter?" Calvin asked.

"Stop overthinking it. I can see you haven't even opened it yet." Serena smiled again, though it didn't reach her eyes and brought her hands up to her cheeks. "Roses, roses." After pinching her cheeks twice Serena was off, turning away from their desks and walking up the aisle, catching the wandering eyes of the students she passed.

Wallace followed her walk to the front of the room where he found Nat standing beside the professor, shocked that he hadn't _heard_ Nat enter the room before he saw him. Serena made the effort to take the long way around the room and came to stop at Nat's side, her arm draping over his shoulder as she leaned over in front of him to speak to the professor.

"Do you know if they're dating?" Calvin asked.

"How would I know?" Persia asked as she rummaged through her bag, eventually pulling a pencil out.

"Hey," Calvin said as he kicked at the back of Neo's desk. "You're the one with all the info, what's the story up there?"

Wallace watched Neo turn slowly at his desk, like a haunted doll from a horror movie.

"Why would I know, or care, if they're together?" Neo asked before he looked to his tablet casually.

"Because you've got everything in your little handheld," Persia said, nodding to the device in question.

"I record _important_ things, not stupid things like the status of someone's relationship," Neo said before he twisted back around in his seat.

Wallace craned his neck to look past Persia to see Garret sitting beside Neo, apparently not interested in their conversation.

While Tempest compared the answers to their effectiveness tests, Wallace found his attention shifting shamelessly from Garret to Serena. "Maybe they are dating," he said as he watched Nat pull papers away from Serena and playfully swat her with them while Serena giggled behind her hand. The longer he watched the more he noticed all the little things she did around Nat, like the way she flipped her hair back when he looked at her, or how she made the effort to always be touching him; her hand on his shoulder or running down his forearm.

"They sure do look good together," Persia added as she turned halfway in her seat, facing Calvin. "I wonder if she likes girls," she asked as she slid the eraser of her pencil between her teeth and tipped her head side to side.

"Oh, hello," Calvin said, his voice dipping comically as he turned to Persia, his mouth spreading into a grin. "You gonna invite me your slumber parties?"

"It doesn't matter if she likes girls," Neo said as he looked over his shoulder, his green eyes finding Persia. "I'd guess you're not her type."

Persia whipped forward like a door slamming shut. "What did you say?" she roared as she raised a trembling fist.

"Miss. Swift, keep it down!"

"Hey, do you need some help?"

Wallace glanced over to see a shadow falling over Tempest's desk, a tall upperclassman standing beside her. He looked like an older version of Calvin with slicked-back hair, an unnatural shade of black, and sharp green eyes. He was dressed in a slim white dress shirt and slacks, a deep blue tie pinned to the front of his shirt. Wallace could see the outlines of muscles through his shirt as he propped himself against Tempest's desk.

"I'm sure a girl like you has the brains to match her beauty, but I'm here for help anyway," he said, a mole and a scar under his right eye catching the light as he smiled. "I'm Travis Fahn," he said with an extended hand.

"Tempest Tlaloc," she replied as she shook his hand. "And I think we're all good here on tutoring. I pulled a 96% on my test, but thank you. Wallace?"

"All good here," he mimicked smugly, wanting Travis to vanish. He pulled his test off Tempest's desk and tapped the solid 80% he managed to get after spending practically the entire week in the ICO lounge with Tempest studying and taking the all of the class time to finish his extended response on the uses of a ring target.

After close to an hour of working through practice problems supplied by Serena and listening to the professor lecture them about memorizing the formula for calculating hidden power's strength, Wallace teetered out of the Origin Center, his head spinning with equations and more questions than answers.

Taking the long way around the building, Wallace left through the upper level and crossed the stone balcony before he took the ramp down, eyeing the stadium field and the edges of the university's island in the distance. As his mind tended to do, it drifted to Chara and thoughts of him escaping back into the bay, away from campus security.

Heading down the ramp Wallace heard the sound of water splashing and metal clanging against the ground before he saw Nat hovering over two bodies on the ground, a puddle of water spreading across the grey stone purlieu of the building. The closer he came Wallace could see it was Don and Cosmo on the ground, cowering beneath their brother.

"You did that on purpose!" Nat growled before he reached down and grabbed the boys by the front of their shirts and lifted them off the ground. "Don't think because we're in public you won't get wedgies that'll make your eyes water. Apologize for spilling water on me!"

"W-We're sorry, N-Nat," Cosmo whined.

Wallace felt his gut clench at the sight of Nat holding his brothers in mid-air, a crowd of students there to witness it, but before the thought of intervening crossed his mind, elgyem had closed the distance between him and Nat.

The intrusion caught Nat's attention and he dropped his brothers, his attention turning to elgyem who was flashing the red lights on his hands at the upperclassman. "Yeah, and what are you gonna do about it? Green freak."

Elgyem floated higher into the air, bringing himself just above Nat's eye level, a low humming coming from his small body. "Elgy!"

"Yeah?" Nat scoffed back as he puffed himself up. "I asked what you were gonna do about it!" Nat brought his hand up and gave elgyem a flick in the center of his head.

"Elgy!" The stubs of elgyem's arms came together on his forehead as he wavering in the air.

Wallace tensed watching elgyem recoil back from the small blow as Nat stepped closer, his fingers posed for another strike. Wallace pushed off from his spot on the ramp and slipped between Don and Cosmo, his shoes scuffing across the ground as he pulled elgyem into the crook of his arm and forced him up against Nat. Without thinking, he swiped between them and slapped Nat's hand away. "Don't ever touch him!" Wallace said.

Nat looked at his hand as if Wallace had just severed it instead of knocked it away, before he pushed himself closer to Wallace. Wallace staggered but held his ground as Nat's chest bumped into his chin and he found himself in a stare-down with someone practically twice his size.

"Spi, spi!"

Wallace felt movement on his shoulder and looked to his periphery to see spinarak emerging from the hood of his shirt. The pinchers on his head aimed at Nat and snapping wildly.

"Look at ya, with these weak 'mons," Nat said as his large and feral eyes sized up spinarak.

Wallace saw a bit if movement at Nat's side before a Poké Ball was pressed to his chest, the cold material digging into his collarbone.

"How about I show you what a real pokémon looks like?" Nat asked, his voice low and grave.

"Nat."

Wallace recognized the voice and saw Travis coming to Nat's side, their eyes meeting for just a second. "You can't. Remember? The Roses. Everyone is watching," Travis said. "They've got eyes and ears everywhere."

"Fuck the Roses," Nat groaned and rolled his eyes, but then took to looking around them.

Wallace did the same, noticing the number of students around them had increased since he joined the fray. A white-hot spike of panic shot down his spine when he saw someone aiming a phone at them. He whipped his head away from the phone and found himself looking at Don who looked visibly scared, his arms crossed over his shoulder and wobbling from foot to foot.

Wallace gasped as a cold hand gripped his jawline and forced him to look straight ahead. Nat pressed the Poké Ball harder into his chest and pushed into Wallace's face with his other hand, the bones in his fingers digging into his cheeks.

"That's not very nice."

Slender hands appeared between Wallace and Nat, one of them gently pushed them apart and the other pulled Nat's hand off Wallace's face. Serena stepped back from the boys, her ice blue eyes looking them up and down, and dropped her hands to her hips. "Fuck the Roses?" she asked, sounding wounded. "I don't think so. Obey the Roses, maybe. Respect the Roses, yes," she said, tapping Nat's nose before her hand fell to his cheek and she pinched it twice. "Roses, roses."

Nat scoffed again and spun the Poké Ball on his finger before minimizing and pocketing it. "You're off the hook, for now, Walter."

"It's Wallace," he said.

"Whatever," Nat said with a roll of his eyes, his cheek growing blush red. "I'm bored. Serena, we're getting lunch, ya coming?"

"Count me out," she said softly before she turned and walked off, waving overhead.

Wallace watched as the crowd seemed to follow her, Nat and Travis eventually vanishing into the mass as well. Slowly, as the crowd thinned out, Wallace couldn't hear anything besides his heart beating and realized elgyem was struggling to get out of his arm. Loosening his grip, Wallace watched elgyem hover over to Cosmo who embraced him in a hug.

"Thank you," Don said as he approached, trying to smooth out a wrinkle in the front of his shirt, no doubt caused by Nat's grip. "You didn't have to do that."

"I did," Wallace said, looking to elgyem who seemed to have forgotten about being flicked now that Cosmo was there. "Your brother is an ass, just so you know."

"We know," Cosmo said as he and elgyem began a game of patty cake.

"That guy, Travis, what did he mean when he said the Roses are watching?" Wallace asked, looking back down the path at the group of retreating students.

Don's lips curled into an odd half-smile, half-frown before he sighed. "It's something Nat went through, but he's not allowed to battle on campus anymore because of it. It's part of why he's always so mad."

"Why would the school make a rule like that for him?" Wallace asked. "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of being a trainer here?"

"It's not the university, it's the Roses," Cosmo said as he guided elgyem back towards Wallace. "They made Nat stop battling because of what he did to a g –"

"Cosmo," Don said, quietly, but with an urgency that made his brother clam up. "Sorry, it's just, complicated. We should go." Don hurried over and grabbed the fallen watering can before he pulled Cosmo along by his elbow.

"Bye Walter! Bye Elgy!" Cosmo said gleefully as he waved back.

Wallace sighed as elgyem took his place back on his shoulder. "It's Wallace," he said under his breath as he crossed the path and headed for the ICO.

Reaching his dorm, Arlette's diary in his book bag felt like a weight on his body and mind. The sooner it was out of his hands the better he would feel about it, despite keeping the copied pages. Climbing his way to the third floor Wallace stopped at his room to retrieve Arlette's bag he stuffed into his closet. He replaced her diary deep down inside where he found it before he left and made his way to room 204, his fist hanging in the air in front of the door.

Tightening his grip on her bag, Wallace gave the door three solid knocks and stepped back. Through the door he heard the faint sound of bed springs and the pad of feet across the floor before the door creaked open, Arlette's wide eye appearing in the gap.

After a second the door moved to slam shut, but Wallace slid his foot across the floor and stuck it in between the door and the frame. It didn't prevent Arlette from trying to pull the door back and slam it on his foot, so Wallace pressed against the door, holding it open.

Giving up, Arlette yanked the door open and backed away. "W-What do you want?"

"Depends on if you're going to send your dragon at me again," he said. After reading Arlette's diary the next task he set for himself was to figure out what she'd released in the yard. Using search words like _scaled_ , _big_ , _tail_ , and _claws_ provided him with a terrifying list of pokémon he was glad he'd never heard of before, but eventually, he found what he was looking for. A draconian pokémon named garchomp that looked much more docile in the online images.

"You left this in my room." Wallace loosened his grip on the bag before he raised it up between them.

"Y-you attacked m-me," she said softly and reached out to take the bag from him.

Wallace let out a withheld breath as the weight of the bag left his hand. "I wanted to apologize, I – I overreacted. But you freaked me out, asking me who I was and all that stuff. I don't have anything to do with that news report, I don't know why you thought I would." By the unwavering look on her face, Wallace could tell his lie wasn't hitting home and with how his voice was shaking he barely believed himself.

Arlette's focus shifted from Wallace to something down the hall and he followed her gaze and saw Tempest fast walking towards them. "H-Hi, Tempest," she said.

"Hey," she said, seemingly out of breath. "Someone's outside our room," Tempest said as she slipped into the room. She dropped her bag onto the floor and made a beeline for the window.

"O-Outside our room?" Arlette asked, her hands wringing together. "W-What does that mean?"

"I saw someone on my way back. A man, maybe," Tempest said, practically hanging out their window. "They were on the sidewalk outside. I swear they were looking up at our room. It might have been a girl, they were kind of small. Dressed all in black. I didn't feel good about it."

"See anything, now?" Wallace asked, his voice tight.

"No, but I'm calling campus security regardless," Tempest said as she left the window and went back to her bag.

The moment she reached down for her bag a loud crack split the air. Despite staring directly at the window, Wallace didn't realize what had happened until it was too late. The girls screamed as the window exploded in a loud eruption of glassy spray. Heart pounding, Wallace threw himself against the hallway wall beside the dorm's entrance as flechettes of glass shot out of the entry and shattered across the tile.

Sound faded inside the room before Wallace peered around the corner, the floor of the girl's room a sea of shards reflecting the sunlight beating through the ruined window. The door shifting startled Wallace before he saw Arlette crawl out from behind it, her bare feet moving precariously across the floor.

"Be careful," Tempest warned as she scooted out from the space beneath her bed, her shoes sliding across the glass. "Is anyone hurt?"

"Fine," Wallace said as he looked up and down his arms before he touched his face. Looking down, Arlette was still crouched, and doing the same check before she nodded to Tempest.

Wallace watched Tempest as she made a path to the window. She grabbed a random book of Arlette's shelf and used it to knock away the glass before she leaned out the window again. Seeing Arlette crouched, practically fetal, Wallace slid his feet across the floor, knocking away the bigger pieces of glass and making an area for her to stand in. She bobbed her head to him as she stood and fingered some stands of her hair back.

"I'm going after them," Tempest said as she brushed past Wallace and out into the hall. "At the very least I have to tell the AD on duty what happened."

"I'll come too," Wallace said, following after her. He listened to the sound of the door shutting before he looked back and saw Arlette retreating inside, a sliver of her face visible in the gap between the door and frame.

He picked up his pace to keep up with Tempest who stormed down the halls, passing students, curious about the sound, before they reached the lobby. The desk was vacant so Tempest pushed past it and headed for the door, but Wallace froze. Perched on the couch, just like their first meeting on campus, was Andrew's mother.

"Wallace?" Tempest asked at the door.

"Go on without me," he said, his eyes focused on Carrie.

Tempest didn't wait before she pushed outside. Wallace watched her through the windows as she crossed the courtyard and vanished out of sight.

"You didn't call," Wallace said, keeping his voice low despite them being alone in the lobby. "Did you?" he asked as he gripped at his pockets.

Carrie sat at the edge of the couch, absently biting her lower lip, a habit he couldn't recall her ever having and staring blankly ahead of her. Wallace followed her line of sight to the flatscreen that sat behind the AD desk. Currently tuned into a news report, Wallace watched footage of his father come across the screen. He recognized the glassy front of the Pearce Productions main office as his father was led out of its front doors with two armed escorts.

Wallace looked back to see Carrie's hand cupping her mouth, her eyes glassy. "What's happening?" he asked, rushing to her side.

"After that picture went public and after what they found in the water, I – I just couldn't think straight." Carrie rubbed the bones in the palms of her hands together before she raked her fingers through her hair. "I spoke to the police, told them I had reason to believe Arlan was involved. It didn't take much and they brought your father in for questioning."

Carrie's words struck him like blows to the gut. "What about Charles?" he asked, slowly easing down onto the couch beside her as his legs wobbled.

"He checked himself into a facility, to deal with the possibility of Andrew's death," Carrie said, wiping at her eyes. "More people are saying they think it was Andrew running from your house that night and that he fell into the sewers. They finished their sweeps of the water channels that run away from the city, they found his holocaster."

Wallace looked back to the screen as the footage of his father being led away played over again. He watched his father's determined walk, never once looking at any of the cameras that swarmed him. His thoughts instantly turned to his last conversation with his father and telling him about his plan to get the blame shifted from Arlette to someone else.

Wallace took in a large breath that riled up the bubbly feeling in his stomach and he doubled over. "No, no, no..."

"It's okay, Wallace!" Carrie gasped as she placed a hand on his back and rubbed in circles. "I know it was wrong, but what I did, I did for us, for Andrew. If he's gone, if he's _dead_ , you're all I have left. I know you're not my son, but it's always felt like that. I've looked after you for so long, before and after what happened at the river with Camille. I'll always look after you."

* * *

End of Chapter Sixteen

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ New character alert! **John (Johnny)** by **Myyddral** , **Calvin Thompson** by **CalzoneCannon** , and **Travis Fahn** by **The Pocketwatch Ripper**.

 **Question(s) of the Chapter #15:** How do you think Arlan will respond to being taking in as a suspect in Andrew's death? Who do you think targeted Arlette?


	17. Run, Wallace

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Seventeen – Run, Wallace**

 _Between the idea and the reality  
_ _Between the motion and the act. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

 _August 9th – Love at First Sight_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _We're in Lumiose City now, we stopped at a quiet café for lunch before we head out. Andrew told me he's taking me back to the Laverre Nature Trail. He showed up at my house this morning with a gift basket. Inside there was candy, flowers, an invitation to his birthday party and a book. I left the basket at my house, but I've got the book with me in my bag. I'd probably be mortified if anyone else had come to my house with a book, a romance novel, in hand. But not him._

 _Andrew discovered my love of romance novels when we first met. It was during our trip to Laverre City. I slipped in a puddle and my bag got wet. Andrew helped me take everything out to keep it from getting soaked through and found a novel I had hidden in the bottom of my bag. I tried to hide it, but he was faster than me and started flipping through the pages and reading different parts. I was so embarrassed, but thankfully no one else was around. He teased me about it, but later on he asked me why I liked them. I didn't want to tell him, I figured he just wanted to keep making fun of me, but he seemed genuinely interested. So I told him why I read them, some of my favorites, and he didn't say anything else about them. He didn't laugh, he didn't make fun of me, he didn't judge me for it._

 _After he left Kalos, every now and then he'd send me suggestions for romance novels he thought I might like. It was so thoughtful and cute I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd actually read all the ones he'd suggested. But one time he did name one I hadn't read. It was written in a foreign language, but its title is Coup de Foudre. As far as I knew no city in Kalos had a copy and I told him that I couldn't find it anywhere. It's been five years since then and this morning he gave me a worn and well-used copy of Coup de Foudre. I found out the title has a few different meanings, but there's one I'm especially fond of…_

 _Nervously Yours, Arlette B._

* * *

Wallace folded a copied page from Arlette's diary in half after straining to read it in the fading light as he expanded with his lungs with the smell of brine that crashed on the artificial shores and crags around Styrax Stadium. The lingering glow of sunset seeped over the horizon, covering the arena with dull light and shrouding the trainers that had already gathered on the turf before the stadium lights clicked on.

The sound of voices and the cries of pokémon garnered his attention to the field that looked completely different since he last saw it. Yesterday, after leaving Xan's Type Balancing lecture with Ignatius, when the boys looped around the building the field had been unremarkable as always. But between then and sunset on Saturday, sections of the field had been cordoned off and filled with different pieces of equipment. Orange cones were arranged across the field along with metallic stands that held targets, training dummies and throwing discs.

Fighting the evening chill, Wallace carefully zipped up his jacket – mindful of elgyem who had decided to fall asleep inside – and stuffed his hands under his arms. He wasn't alone in the bleachers overlooking the stadium, many trainers, underclassmen he guessed due to how many of them he recognized, were huddled in groups on the metallic risers watching older and more enthusiastic students on the field taking full use of the provided equipment.

It wasn't until well after the sun had set that Wallace began to hear whispers of the professor for the lab arriving. Still, he remained rooted to the bleachers, as the metal under him had become tolerable due to his body heat seeping through it. Elgyem had woken up by then and taken it upon himself to retrieve spinarak's Poké Ball so that the two of them may eat their dinner of PokéPuffs together and look over Wallace's egg.

The sound of splashing and something hard falling onto the bleachers snapped Wallace's attention from the babysitting scene his pokémon had created. Glancing up Wallace saw a woman groveling on the walkway of the bleachers, her head hung and thick ash brown curls hanging around her.

A few students were muttering around him and some started laughing once the woman got to her feet and picked up a white cup, stained down the side with something brown.

As Wallace narrowed his eyes, sure he saw the woman's shoulders jumping with the onset of tears, someone shuffled down to the space beside him and a small pad of paper was held out to him. Wallace grabbed the pad before he lifted his eyes to find Christopher sitting with considerable space between them. "Oh, hey," Wallace said, noting Christopher's hair looked clean and that he was outside, not buried in a cocoon of blankets. "Christopher, right? You room with Neo."

Christopher's lips folded down into a frown and his dark skin folded on his forehead before he tapped at the pad in Wallace's hands.

There were many words and short sentences written along the page, all spaced out and written in script that looked too precise to be manmade, but Wallace's eyes focused on where Christopher designated. Call me Kit, please.

"Ah, right, so you're not –" Wallace said, but Christopher's finger sliding down to the middle of the page cut him off. Deaf? No. Wallace nodded as he watched Christopher's finger drag to the top of the page, his unclipped nail stopping short of a line. I'm not mute either.

"So you just, prefer not to talk?" Wallace asked as he looked over the page, a point of annoyance boiling within him as he expected Christopher's answer to already be written there. His guess was proven right as the boy ran his finger down to the bottom of the page. It's easier for me like this.

Wallace regarded the boy with a half-smile as he became fully annoyed, feeling as if the entire conversation was planned out or that he was far from the first person to have similar questions for Christopher. Rather than Christopher pointing to another pre-listed response, the boy lightly tugged the notepad from Wallace's hands and folded over a new page.

Wallace watched as Christopher brandished an intricate looking pen and scrawled at the top of the page before he held it out again. That woman is the adjunct professor for our lab, Professor Vivian Summers. She's interesting.

"Oh?" Wallace straightened up as he looked to the front of the bleachers, Vivian was making her way up the bleachers, stopping to talk to students who were still seated as she passed them. "It looked like she was about to cry."

From just a few rows above her, Wallace could make out light dots across the sun-kissed skin of her nose. She had the round features of someone who would probably never outgrow their baby face. If he hadn't known better he might have confused her for an older student in her tank top and shorts, but small things, the way skin folded under the straps of her top, relayed her age was beyond what he would have immediately guessed.

A strange noise, the cross of someone clearing their throat and a whistle, brought Wallace's attention back to Christopher who was holding the pad out to him again, a wide and fearful look on his face. She dropped her hot chocolate. You're Wallace, right?

"Uh, yeah. Nice to meet you," Wallace said and extended his hand over the pad.

The pad slipped from Christopher's hand and the boy scooted away from Wallace as if he'd just pulled a knife on him. Wallace slowly curled his fingers back in and then pulled his hand to his chest, attempting to figure out what had just happened when he noticed the look in Christopher's eyes had gotten worse. He looked afraid that Wallace might strike him.

"I'm sorry?" Wallace said as he bent over and grabbed Christopher's pad. "Did I – Did I do something wrong?" he asked, a little exasperated as he held the pad out, but once he saw Christopher making no effort to grab it he dropped it in the space on the bleacher between them. "Okay, fine."

Wallace blew air through his lips with derision as he stuffed his hands back into his pockets and watched Professor Summers slowly climbing the steps. Moments passed before he heard the same sound, a whistle into someone practically growling before he noticed Christopher had moved closer and was holding the pad to him.

Rather than take it, Wallace cocked his head to the side and regarded the puzzling boy with a downward smirk. Christopher's lips twitched into what Wallace had to guess was an apology smile before he pushed the pad forward. Sorry, I have a thing about touching. It's not you.

"Won't talk, won't touch?" Wallace said and averted his eyes from the page the moment he was done reading. "You must be a fun roommate," he said, his voice full of venom.

Christopher flipped back to the top page and pointed to something as he held the page out. Wallace sighed and tipped his head in the direction of the pad. I'm sorry.

"It's fine," Wallace said, a little softer.

From the corner of his eye Wallace was sure he saw Christopher smile before he flipped the page and started writing furiously, but when he presented the page the words there were etched into the pad with the precision that looked to be the work of a computer. I hear things about you, things people say about you.

"Great," Wallace said sharply. "Always good to know."

A look of hurt crossed Christopher's otherwise blank features before he took to writing again. But I don't pay attention to them! Rumors could be true, but they could also be as false as the person spreading them. People say things about me, but Neo doesn't listen to them. He says I'm weird sometimes, but that's because we live together, not because of what other people think. We talk like we're talking now, he types and I write. He's your friend, right?

"It's complicated." Wallace wet his lips. His prayers for a distraction were quickly answered as the professor's heavy steps thudded against the bleachers and she stopped in the row below them.

"Hi!" she said, a hand shooting out in greeting. "I'm Professor Summers, but please call me Vivi! And you are?"

"Wallace Peters," Wallace said. He moved to shake the woman's hand before noticing an odd splotch of what he hoped was chocolate on her palm. "This is Christopher, but pleasecall him Kit, and he doesn't shake hands."

"Oh," Professor Summers' smile faltered as Wallace's mocking tone hit her, but it bounced back rather quickly. "You're funny, I think we'll be friends. Well, feel free to take to the field. You can use whatever you want down there." The professor turned and held a hand to her forehead like a visor as she looked out over the field. "Um, if you find a sawsbuck out there, please don't scare it away."

Wallace frowned as he stood up, cradling elgyem and spinarak in his arms before they took their usual positions. He grabbed his egg, that felt heavier each passing day, before he shuffled down the line, hearing Christopher's feet behind him. He stopped when he heard that sound again that he guessed was Christopher's way of getting his attention and turned to find Christopher's notepad at the ready. Would you like to work together?

"Sure," Wallace said as he turned and climbed down the steps. On his way down to the balcony and onto the field, Wallace reeled back in his memory to when Neo first mentioned Christopher and how he'd been forced into a battle during the tournament and his only pokémon had been gravely burned.

When they found an empty spot on the field, spray painted with the markings of a battle arena, Christopher took his spot across from Wallace and tossed a ball out. It broke open on the turf and released a small quadruped of varying shades of green with a large sleek bulb on its back. Bulbasaur, the name popped into Wallace's head in Neo's voice.

"Spinarak, I think this will be good for you. We can try out your new moves," Wallace said as he nudged the pokémon dangling from the front of his jacket. Without a PokéDex Wallace often visited one of the campus PCs to check when elgyem or spinarak learned new moves which usually came as a surprise to him. "Use poison sting," he said.

Spinarak jumped from Wallace's chest and flipped in the air before he spewed out a barrage of purple needle-like projectiles. Wallace watched, wondering how Christopher planned on commanding his pokémon before the small seed pokémon leaped into the air. Spinarak's poison spray dissipated into the air as it passed under bulbasaur that landed a few yards away.

Wallace heard something from Christopher's side, a command perhaps, thought it was faint and lost in the wind. Bulbasaur began to sway, moving its body in an oddly hypnotic pattern before deep pink petals began to spew out of its bulb. The petals shot into the air, catching the stadium lights, and swirling around in a funnel of sorts before they broke out of formation and headed for spinarak.

"Spinarak, head straight for the bulbasaur and use infestation!" Wallace said as he watched the petals surround spinarak.

Spinarak zipped forward, skittering across the turf as the assault of petals rained down on him. Every couple of steps a petal would slam into spinarak, knocking him off course from bulbasaur and directly into another petal that bounced him around like a ball. Over the whirl of petals, Wallace was sure he heard Christopher say something else, though it sounded off somehow. Between watching spinarak struggle against the onslaught, Wallace saw two long and dangerous looking vines eject from around bulbasaur's seed.

In a brief pause from the whirlwind of petals, spinarak managed to make it within the range of bulbasaur, only to whacked by one of the vines. Wallace winced hearing spinarak cry out as he was launched into the air and struck by another vine.

"Try string shot?" Wallace said, eyeing the mass of petals above their small arena that he was sure would rain down on them at any moment. For a brief second, he feared they'd ignore spinarak and come straight for him the way Chara's meganium had attacked him.

"Bulba!" Bulbasaur groaned as its vines drooped to the ground, the ends tangled in a messy glob of strings.

Spinarak climbed off and clicked its pinchers at Wallace before he darted around headed for bulbasaur. Wallace watched as spinarak wasted no time for the petals to come for him and launched himself onto bulbasaur's back and bit down. His red mandibles glimmered before he detached himself and jumped off just as the first petal struck him.

Between watching spinarak struggle to dodge the petals coming at him from every direction, Wallace watched bulbasaur twitch and shake, occasionally craning its head back to snap at the spot that spinarak had used infestation.

Wallace saw a glint of light reflect off something before he saw Christopher holding a Poké Ball. Rather than recall bulbasaur, the pokémon cried out before a thick haze of purple fog spilled from its mouth.

"Spinarak, get away!" Wallace cried, but rather than attack, the bulbasaur vanished inside the haze and Christopher fired his ball into the cloud. As the haze cleared Wallace saw bulbasaur had been recalled and the petals from its attack were flitting down harmlessly on them. "I win?" Wallace asked as he let one of the petals fall onto his hand.

A rustling in the tree line near their marked off area caught his attention and Wallace looked towards Christopher, who had already turned in the direction of the sound before something large and brown leaped out from the trees and knocked the boy over.

A majestic and proud looking pokémon, with a mix of dark and light brown fur, stomped around the fallen trainer. Large and twisted antlers had sprouted from its head and vibrant pink buds had bloomed into flowers along their length. As if knowing it had caught the attention of another, the pokémon turned to Wallace and glared down its snout at him.

Christopher twitched on the ground and seemed to be scrambling to get to his feet. The action alerted the pokémon that jolted and then jumped back, standing on its hind legs before it began stomping down around Christopher who covered his head and Wallace could clearly hear was whimpering. The pokémon snorted before it turned its attention to Wallace again and charged.

The sound of its hoofed feet on the turf pounded in sync with Wallace's heart before elgyem passed before Wallace's eyes. The small pokémon lifted his hands and erected a wall between them and the charging pokémon. Wallace watched, familiar with the variant of elgyem's confusion attack when the pokémon's antlers struck it. A chap appeared in the center of the wall before elgyem pushed forward and the wall curved, wrapping around the horned pokémon.

Elgyem pulled his arms back before he pressed forward. "Elgy!" he groaned, his arms shaking under the pressure.

Wallace bit his lip as he watched the pokémon slowly be forced back, but it was a losing battle as it started to ram the orb containing it, widening the crack. "Elgyem, let it go," Wallace said as he wrapped his arm around elgyem's body and pulled him out of the way.

The orb shattered into flecks of light that faded quickly as the pokémon charged past them. It didn't take off completely, though, only moving forward a few feet before it turned its attention to Wallace again.

"Hold up," a nearly slurred voice said from the tree line.

Wallace dared to spare a glance in that direction and found a woman, as white as a sheet, emerging from the trees. She held a Poké Ball aloft and it seemed to startle the rampant pokémon who began trouncing around and snorting. Wallace watched as the woman approached slowly, aiming the ball at the pokémon who was still throwing a fit but didn't run off, instead it seemed to calm slightly as she approached.

"Sawsbuck likes to play," she said before she fired a beam at the pokémon and the sawsbuck vanished in a flare of light.

"Sienna, hi!"

Wallace whipped around and saw Professor Summers practically hanging off the balcony and waving madly towards the woman on the field. The woman, Sienna, regarded the distant professor with a curt smile before she replied with a lazy wave. "I'm Professor Oakburn," she said, fingering a strand of her berry blonde hair out of her face. "You're one of my students?" she asked, her hooded and lazy brown eyes looking Wallace up and down.

"Uh, yeah," Wallace said before he observed the professor just as closely as she looked him over. Like Professor Summers, she could easily be mistaken for a student in her faded jeans and a grey hoodie. "I'm Wallace," he said before his eyes wandered off to Christopher who was slowly getting to his feet. "That pokémon was yours?"

Oakburn nodded before she sighed and glanced around the field, seemingly not interested in any of the other sessions going on judging by how quickly she looked over them. "He's a wild one," she said, her voice colorless. "Anyway," she said with a shrug before she walked off.

Wallace waited for her to continue her thought, but instead, she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her hoodie and walked off, her feet dragging against the turf. Once he was sure she wasn't coming back Wallace headed over to Christopher, collecting spinarak along the way. "You okay?" he asked.

Christopher looked visibly shaken, his eyes were wide and darting about erratically. Wallace waited for him to pull out his pad and a pen, but instead, Christopher hugged himself and started walking fast off the turf. Feeling abandoned for the second time Wallace wandered across the field, unsure of which obstacle or training area to try next.

Wandering around sets of weights and exercise balls Wallace passed a series of benches on the side of the stadium opposite the bleachers and found a few familiar pairs sitting there. Neo was sitting with Eleanor at the edge of one bench, his tablet held out before Eleanor who had her head thrown back in laughter. A feeling of guilt bloomed in his chest seeing Eleanor be carefree for a moment. Her laughter continued to the point she started to kick her legs before a loud snort came out and she froze. Neo sat straight up, but his face broke into a wide grin before the two started laughing together.

On the other side of the bench, Arlette was hunched over and rubbing down the length of a mareep's head. Beside her, Garret was holding Arlette's litwick, Chandler, that Wallace recalled meeting in the Health and Wellness center.

The sight of the four of them together made Wallace long to join them, but more than that he wanted to share a moment like that with someone and so he started glancing around the stadium in search of a familiar face. Further down the same side of the stadium, Wallace found Tempest standing beside Serena, the two of them in the shadow of the scoreboard, chatting with lots of hand motions.

He made a beeline for them and Serena made a quick glance in his direction before she pinched at Tempest's cheek and then strutted off across the field.

"Tempest, hey," he said, jogging the rest of the way to her.

"Hey," she said as she turned to him and rubbed at her cheek, growing red. "What's up?"

"Did I interrupt something?" he asked and nodded in Serena's direction.

"Oh, just trying to take care of the whole window getting blown out thing," Tempest said as she followed Wallace's gaze to Serena's retreating walk, nearly as satisfying to watch as her approaching walk.

"She works for public safety?" he asked, eyebrows cocked.

"No," Tempest laughed. "I already talked to them. They repaired the window yesterday, but they're saying it broken because of a training accident and won't do anything about finding that person I saw standing outside. They said it was probably just a passerby. So I went to the Roses to tell them about it and what's been happening to Arlette, the letters, the threats. I think the window was done by the same person."

"The Roses," Wallace repeated. "What are they? Someone mentioned them the other day. I know Serena is in charge of them or something?"

"Yeah, she was chosen to be the leader this year," Tempest said. "But it's not safe to talk about in public, the professors and the university staff might hear. If you want to know more just keep your eyes open," she said brightly before she walked off towards the opposite side of the stadium.

"Watch out!"

Wallace followed the sound of a panicked warning and looked over his shoulder in time to see something bright strike the ground near him. A flash of white, brighter than the stadium lights, crossed his vision and blinded him for a moment before he was knocked off his feet by an unseen force.

Tumbling through the air Wallace felt the weights of elgyem, spinarak, and his egg, leave his body before he hit the ground and rolled head and heels before he fell flat on his stomach.

Wallace roughly coughed up a ball of spit in his throat and shook his head to clear a sharp and sizzling intensity from his mind. Looking up he found spinarak suspended in mid-air, flailing desperately as he was haloed by a bright pink light. Beside him, the egg was held in a similar fashion as elgyem hovered above them.

"Oh," Wallace groaned as he rubbed his head. "Elgy, thanks. What was that?" Looking around for the spot he'd been standing in, Wallace found the turf grass burned black and a large blue pokémon standing beside it. Its fur, a warm yellow, stood up in thick spikes as if it been struck by lightning, but the longer Wallace looked he realized the pokémon was the lightning.

Streaks of blue and white electricity moved erratically across the pokémon's body, the sharp peaks of its fur acting like conductor poles. It craned its neck around and Wallace found himself staring into two large red eyes of a canine.

* * *

 _A few feet from the bank they'd come from stood a large canine that looked ragged, thin, and tired. Patches of mud were caked against its thin black coat and hardened into chunks against the grey bone-like ridges around its body and against two large horns protruding from its head._

 _When Wallace caught the red eyes of the pokémon its whip-like tail whisked back and forth a few times and it whimpered, bowing its head._

 _"Ohh, a houndoom!" Andrew gasped. "It must belong to a trainer. Hey boy, where's your trainer?"_

 _The houndoom's tail flicked from side to side before it took a limping step forward._

 _Wallace gripped the tree, feeling it jolt as Andrew stomped closer. "I think he's hurt, I think there's blood. I'll go help it, maybe give it a treat," Andrew said as he walked towards Wallace, balancing in the center of the tree._

 _Wallace's eyes never left the houndoom and as Andrew came closer he saw the pokémon's posture change and something in the woods shift. He scanned the trees and threw an arm out to stop Andrew as he caught sight of something on the ground._

 _Another houndoom crouched belly to the ground, under low hanging branches, occasionally scooting forward and into sight. It looked to be in the same state as the one on the bank, ragged and muddy, but larger, the horns on its head curving further back._

 _The houndoom on the bank let out a playful yip and ducked its head, flicking its tail enthusiastically, but Wallace didn't fall for it._

 _Andrew laughed as he grabbed Wallace's hand, trying to move his arm out of the way. "It wants to play with us, let's go."_

 _Wallace pressed back into Andrew, keeping him from moving any further as his frantic eyes scanned the rest of the tree line. He found two more. Both were pressed to the ground under low branches, inching forward, but careful not to fully expose themselves. "Go back!" he hissed._

 _"What's wrong? It wants to play," Andrew asked, still fighting his arm._

 _"There's more of them," Wallace said as he struggled to scoot away from the bank and push Andrew back. "They don't want to play."_

 _"Where? I only see one – oh," Andrew gasped._

 _Wallace flicked his eyes up and down the bank as the other three slid out from their hiding places. When he looked back, the one on the bank didn't look playful anymore. Its head was still bowed, but even from his distance Wallace could see ridges and lines around the pokémon snout as it bared its teeth, its red eyes shining. "Go away!" he yelled, sounding less like a threat and more like a chew toy. "Get out of here, go!"_

 _As the houndoom gathered together they passed looks to one another before they all looked towards the river before the largest of the pack and one other began sniffing and walking along the bank._

 _"What are they doing?" Andrew asked, his voice high and tight. "Are they going to leave?"_

 _"I think they want to find a way up," Wallace said as he watched the canines stalk the bank. He watched each of their footfalls, hoping they'd step on a wet patch of leaves or step awkwardly on a rock and tumble into the water. "What type are they?"_

 _"Uh, dark," Andrew said. "No wait, fire? Maybe ghost? Can pokémon have three types?"_

 _Wallace whipped his head around to his friend who was gripping the sides of his head, visibly straining himself. Andrew was just a few years shy of leaving to become a trainer and take the Kalos Challenge and professed to know all there was about pokémon despite having only seen those local to Lumiose, but Wallace never felt more let down by his lack of knowledge._

 _"What about your mom's pokémon?" Wallace asked, his eyes falling to a bulge on the side of Andrew's sweatshirt._

 _Andrew lifted the shirt and prodded the pack Carrie had given him that morning. He unzipped it and pulled out a handful of Poké Balls. "I don't know what's inside! Why don't adults label them or something? How are you supposed to know what to use?"_

 _Wallace grimaced as he watched Andrew turn over each of the red and white Poké Balls before he looked up to Carrie's spritzee. "Can Pinky fight them?"_

 _Spritzee let out a quivering cry as she shook her head and seemed to shrink against Andrew's back._

 _"She's just a baby," Andrew said as he unclipped the pack and crouched with it onto the trunk, still rummaging through the half dozen Poké Balls inside. "Oh wait!" Andrew shot up and spun and Wallace saw it happen the moment before it did._

 _"Andrew!" he cried._

 _Andrew's foot clipped the edge of the pack and Wallace lunged forward, but was about a foot shy as the pack slid off the trunk and tumbled over several times, each of its flips emptying a few Poké Balls out each time before it hit the water with a dull splash. Wallace pressed his face to the trunk, feeling sick as water filled the pack and the river swallowed it._

 _"Sorry, Wally," Andrew said, his teeth bared in a terrified grin. "I was going to say we should run to the other bank. I'm really sorry. My mom is going to kill me."_

 _"Your mom isn't the one I'm worried about," Wallace said as he glanced upstream. The houndoom were crossing the river, using stones that protruded in a shallow area to cross, their eyes shifting between the boys and the rest of their way across._

 _Wallace ran his hands under the tree trunk and found a thick branch. He tugged at it and the branch bent as he worked it back and forth. He squeezed his thighs around the trunk as he tugged harder and heard the branch snap and then squeal as he pulled, feeling the wood split and tear away from the trunk. Wallace gave another solid tug and the branch snapped away so easily he almost lost his balance. Squeezing tighter onto the trunk Wallace fell forward and smacked his chin on the trunk._

 _"You alright?" Andrew asked as he crouched before him, his eyes glossy._

 _"Are you crying?" Wallace asked as he pulled the branch up, fighting his own urge to cry as he ignored the stinging throb of pain in his chin._

 _"No!" Andrew barked before he wiped at his eyes and looked down the river. "My mom's pokémon, they're gone, forever."_

 _"We'll get them, we just have to get out of here first," Wallace said. "Can you get around me and go back the way we came?"_

 _Andrew nodded and hopped up, causing the trunk to shake. He muttered an apology before he inched around Wallace and made his way towards a large branch that stuck out from the trunk. Wallace followed him, swinging his leg over he scooted across the trunk before he dropped onto the branch hard enough the impact rattled up his spine. With both of them on the branch, he noticed it was bending and creaking under their weights, but it held._

 _Looking back, Wallace saw the largest of the pack had made it across and was eyeing the trunk, but another of the pack was already on the trunk and nearing the V section Andrew had been standing on when he found him._

 _"Hold on, Andrew, find something to grab." Wallace swung his leg back over until he was straddling the branch, a less secure feeling than the trunk as he tightened his grip on the branch he tore off. The houndoom was inching closer and closer before Wallace swung._

 _The branch whistled through the air, but the houndoom saw it coming and lunged to catch it with its teeth, but missed. The end Wallace tore from the trunk smacked the pokémon on the side of its neck and the canine yelped, its nails scraping and skittering across the bark before it slipped off the trunk and smacked into the river with a loud splash that sprayed the boys with ice water._

 _Wallace's chest heaved with elation as he followed the river and saw the houndoom's head bobbing to the surface. Its mouth flapping open as it let out pained yelps as the river carried it further downstream._

 _Below him, Andrew wiped his forehead as he dripped with river water. "Nice! I'm sure they're fire-types, it should be dead right?"_

 _"We should be so lucky," Wallace said, quoting his father, as he looked downstream and found the houndoom clambering onto the shore, water steamed from its body before it came bounding back up the bank._

 _"Wally!"_

 _Wallace whipped around and saw one of the canines working its way up the base of the trunk they'd used to climb up. Something in the corner of his eyes brought Wallace's attention back to the right side of the trunk where the largest houndoom had made its way onto the trunk and was stepping carefully towards them._

 _"They're coming from both sides!" Andrew yelled._

 _Wallace shuddered and let his arm sag, the branch in his hand suddenly feeling very heavy when something rocketed out of the woods. It was too fast for Wallace to make out, but he saw brown fur and fire and knew it was another pokémon._

 _"Not another one!" Andrew cried out. "Wallace, it's going to get us!"_

 _Wallace's stomach bubbled as the newest addition to the scene never stopped moving. After lunging from the tree-line it darted towards the trunk and slammed into the houndoom attempting to climb up. The blow knocked the canine into the air. Wallace watched it flail awkwardly before it came down, hard, on its back._

 _Its neck was exposed and in a flash, the blur of fire and fur struck. Its head bowed down onto the squealing houndoom before Wallace heard the canine's voice cut out. Wallace watched the pokémon make a single twist before the houndoom went still and a fountain of blood gushed from the houndoom's neck._

 _Wallace shifted his focus from the fallen houndoom to what had just saved them. Pyroar stood above the body of the houndoom, a chunk of bloody flesh in its mouth. Its body was nothing more than bundles of muscles under a taut blanket of golden brown fur. Wallace narrowed his eyes to see past the intense burning mane at two great, savage, solemn, terrifying eyes; and he felt himself go weak with relief. "Mom," he whispered._

* * *

"Is he dead?"

"Give him some room."

"Oh, I think he's waking up."

"Wallace, can you hear me? It's Don."

The voices around Wallace reached him like he was trapped in glass jar stuffed with cotton. The muffled feeling slowly faded and Wallace took in the sound of feet moving around him. He spread his hands out and took in fistfuls of fake grass around him, he was still lying on the stadium field. The sweet smell of berries and a soft breath brushed over his face and as he peeled open his eyes Wallace was greeted by the inverted view of Don's face staring down at him. "You're breathing on me," he muttered, his mouth gummy and dry.

Don opened his mouth to speak, but a hand cupped his chin and he was yanked out of sight before he could utter a word. Wallace shifted to sit up when he felt a pair of hands under his back helping him up. Turning around, Wallace saw Don being held up by the back of his shirt by Nat.

"You're such a freak, Bella," Nat said. "Stop breathing all over people."

Don squirmed as he struggled to pull his shirt down over his stomach, his legs kicking against the ground as Nat kept him aloft. "I-I'm sorry."

Wallace looked away from Don when a hand landed on his shoulder and found Tempest crouched beside him. "Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself," Tempest said, smiling wide. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, but what happened?" he asked.

The crowd before him broke apart as Professor Oakburn stepped into view, her arms crossed and look of boredom plastered across her face. "You passed out."

"That manectric struck the ground near you and you were thrown through the air," Tempest said as her eyes fell from Wallace's face to a spot beyond him. "I was so worried. The shock must have made you pass out."

"Manectric?" he asked before he followed her gaze to find the blue and yellow pokémon standing a few feet away at the side of a young looking trainer. Seeing the pokémon again he remembered the blow but knew that wasn't why he blacked out. The sight of red eyes boring down at him had sent him reeling back to the memory of the river.

"Sorry about that!" The trainer standing beside manectric regarded Wallace with a wide smile as he scratched the back of his head. He was an odd sight for Wallace to take in. Tall and muscular, but visibly young, with skin that was either naturally brown or a result of much time spent baking under the sun and hair so red it could only be natural.

"Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my! Someone, please tell me he's okay!"

Pulling his attention away from the boy to a gap in the crowd beside Professor Oakburn, Wallace saw Professor Summers running at him like she was on fire. "I saw it happen! Is he okay? Someone tell me something!" she cried as darted into the circle, but was stopped short by the arm of Professor Oakburn who snatched her back the way Nat had grabbed Don.

Professor Oakburn pulled Professor Summers under her arm and clamped a hand over her mouth. "You have two eyes, use them and see that's he fine. Then I want you to see that you're making an unnecessary scene. Calm down and come back to reality."

Professor Summers mumbled something behind her colleague's hand before she nodded. "Sorry," she said as Oakburn pulled her hand away. "I just got scared when I saw that pokémon's attack heading for him."

Oakburn narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side in disbelief. "He's been out for as least five minutes, what took you so long to get here?"

"I was in concessions looking for a snack," Professor Summers said as she averted her eyes and looked to the ground like an errant child.

Professor Oakburn sighed before she turned her attention back to the class. "Who are you?" she asked with a lazy hand pointing to the boy with the manectric.

Wallace looked back to the boy as well, but before he could respond a familiar face appeared from the crowd.

"He's with me." Mieko, from the grief counseling meeting, stepped ahead of the trainer. "His name is Hunter Wright, he's a trainer visiting the university on a tour. We were sparring when his manectric missed its wild charge. It was an unfortunate accident," Mieko said, her dark eyes focused on Wallace.

"Oh yeah?" Oakburn said. "An accident, huh? Do you know how much paperwork would have been involved if he'd been hurt?"

"He could have died!" Don said.

Don's unusually loud and forceful voice garnered Wallace's attention back to him in time to see Nat covering his mouth again. "Would ya please close than hole under your nose?" Nat growled.

"Lab is over for today, no more accidents on my watch," Oakburn said before she turned and walked off. "Get yourself blown up on someone else's time."

Professor Summers laughed nervously as glanced around at the gathered students. "She didn't mean that," she said before she looked back and jogged after Oakburn. "You didn't mean that, did you? Sienna?"

With Tempest's help, Wallace slowly got to his feet, the memories of the river more lingering than the feeling of static from his close encounter with manectric. As the excitement died many of the students that had gathered quickly vanished, slinking up the steps to the balcony or taking direct paths off the stadium field.

"How do you feel?" Tempest said, her hand still on his shoulder.

"Fine, really," Wallace said. "A little shaken up."

Tempest gave his arm a squeeze before she nodded and headed off, looking back at him a few times as she crossed the field.

"Really sorry about almost hitting you," Hunter said as he and Mieko approached.

"Yeah," Wallace said, unable to think of anything else to say as accepting his apology didn't sit well with him. From the corner of his eyes he saw elgyem approaching, still hovering in the air with spinarak and the egg under his control. Wallace opened his arms and welcomed them all in an awkward hug. "Thanks for taking care of them."

"Elgy," elgyem hummed into his chest before he clambered back onto his shoulder.

"Denvy will be happy to know the egg is doing fine," Mieko said as she stopped beside Hunter. "I'm sorry too. His manectric missed kirlia. I didn't think anyone was behind me. Seraphia, say hi."

Wallace raised his brows before he saw a small white pokémon with a mop of green hair hanging over its face poking its head out from behind Mieko's leg. It looked Wallace up and down with a large red eye before it teetered out and curtseyed before him. With pleated ruffles spreading out from its hips and the way it balanced on the tips of its green feet the pokémon looked like some kind of sci-fi ballerina.

"We should get going, Hunter, let's go," Mieko said as she placed a hand on Hunter's back and guided him away.

"See ya!" Hunter said, waving enthusiastically over his head to Wallace.

After realizing he was the only one left on the field, Wallace trudged off towards the bleachers to collect his bag when the first stadium light shut off. A loud clicking sound echoed across the field before one set of the eight-light rig went dark, blacking out one corner of the field.

Wallace paused halfway up the stairs at the light went out and gazed around the field before he could take another step the second set of lights went out. "I'm still out there!" he said, looking over the remaining six light sets.

When the next set went out, Wallace jerked in his spot on the stairs. He was suddenly paralyzed; it felt self-proclaimed – if he hadn't been watching the lights, they wouldn't have gone out – and his breath quickened as he climbed the last steps.

Over the sound of his feet pounding the steel bleachers, his heart thumping against his ribcage, and his breath hammering out through his lips Wallace barely heard the sound of two more let sets shutting off. With panicked and trembling hands, Wallace stuffed his egg inside his bag and slipped his arms through the straps.

He wasted no time in returning to the walkway and running down the steps, but when he reached the main level two more lights shut off and he froze. Only one set of lights remained in and the illuminated a perfect circle in the center of the field, giving a spotlight to a body standing in the middle of the stadium.

An acidic stripe of vomit slithered up Wallace's throat and he was sure everything he'd eaten that day was bound to follow it. He staggered forward and gripped the railing, his legs going weak as he strained to make out the figure below.

A flash of red in his periphery startled Wallace before he realized it was just elgyem. Elgyem flashed the digit on his hand in Wallace's face before he pointed to the press box that sat at the top of the bleachers. Wallace stared at the rectangular box, four walls and just one door, making it the safest place in sight.

Without sparing another look to the field Wallace took off for the box. He ran the length of the balcony before he reached the walkway that would lead him directly to the box. He gave one quick glance over his shoulder and saw the figure on the field hadn't moved before he booked it up the steps. His steps were loud on the steel and reverberated across the bleachers before a crack split the air, followed by the hum of static.

"RUN, WALLACE!"

A voice shattered through the static, startling Wallace and making him lose his footing. His foot landed on the edge of one step and slipped, his body falling forward and slamming against the steel. He groaned on the verge of tears as the same words blared out over the stadium.

"RUN, WALLACE! RUN, WALLACE! RUN, WALLACE! RUN, WALLACE! RUN, WALLACE! RUN, WALLACE!"

Wallace gritted his teeth, breathing through the pain in his knees and chest where he hit the steps and raced up the last stretch of steps until he reached the press box door, but he froze. The night of the tournament played back in his mind when Nat spoke to the crowd as the tournament announcer from inside the press box. Wallace's fingers jittered just a breath away from the door knob before they curled back into his palm and he shifted his weight onto this back foot.

Looking down the length of the box, Wallace could just barely see through the grimy windows on the face of the room, but he was sure he saw a human-shaped figure move inside. Wallace held his breath as he eased down one step, trying to stay as quiet and move as calmly as possible, despite being sure whoever was inside knew he was out there. Dread washed over Wallace, chilling him to the core. His rampage up to the box was exactly what they wanted.

Wallace clenched his fists as he eased down another step, and then another, pressure building in his chest, before the door to the press box burst open. "Chara!" Wallace bellowed as the face in all of his nightmares emerged from the shadow of the press box.

In the dim light Wallace could just make out the wicked grin on Chara's face before he crossed one arm over his face and swung the other out, a glint of metal catching the distant light. Wallace weaved back, slipping down another step as he heard something slice the air in front of him.

Unable to force himself to turn and flee, Wallace gripped the railing beside him as he continued to stumble and trip down the steps. His eyes stayed on the object clutched in Chara's hand as he swung and swerved dangerously closer with every movement.

Wallace glanced at his feet as he landed on a platform and found himself on one of the flat pieces of the walkway that lead off into horizontal walkways. Chara noticed his hesitation and lunged forward, knife ready to stab, but Wallace tore off to the side and darted down one row of seats.

Wallace listened to Chara's heavy footsteps gaining on him as he mentally calculated his best course of action to get off the bleachers. In the heat of the moment the steel risers were turning into nothing more than a steel maze. As he neared another platform and moved to run down to the balcony, Wallace felt Chara's fingers graze the back of his head and then snag onto his backpack.

The force of Chara's pull caused the straps of Wallace's bag to cut into his shoulders and forced a rough cough from his mouth. Wallace felt himself being forced forward as Chara shoved and then led him towards the end of the bleachers and up against a chain link that acted as a barrier.

"We meet again," Chara said, his breath rancid and hot as it brushed past Wallace's cheek.

Wallace bit in his lip as Chara's hand gripped his shoulder and he spun around. The moment they were facing each other a glob of white spray shot into Chara's face, startling the boy for a moment. Wallace let out a withheld breath as he looked to spinarak who was snapping his mandibles wildly at Chara.

Chara doubled over as he tore the string shot from his face, his mouth twisting from a smile into a grimace of hatred. Before Wallace thought to move, Chara lunged for him and punched him deep in his gut. Wallace's mouth yawned open in a silent cry as he worried the knife had been plunged into him.

"You're getting off easy," Chara said as he pressed his forehead to Wallace's, his knife appearing between them and prodding Wallace in the throat. "Your friend, the girl with the arcanine, I'm going to carve her up and then snap her neck. But lucky you gets to avoid step two."

"Poison sting," Wallace said, his voice holding no more power than the breeze.

Wallace watched from the corner of his eye as spinarak's pinchers opened and a small jet stream of poisoned projectiles sprayed into the side of Chara's face. The boy howled and staggered back, cupping the side of his face. His knife clattered to the bleachers as he doubled over and fell to his knees.

Wallace weakly kicked at the knife, expecting it to go flying, but the weapon merely slid a row down and vanished beneath a seat. Wallace tore off from his spot on the fence, hopping and climbing over rows of seats to reach the balcony. Without looking back he knew Chara was in pursuit from the sounds of him cursing and stumbling over the same seats.

Wallace slammed onto the stone balcony and rushed to the railing before he looked down the line and found the nearest set of stairs that led onto the field. Just as he made a motion to go for them, Chara staggered into view, blocking his way.

Blood poured from the left side of Chara's face, dotting the shoulder and chest of his striped sweater as he swayed side to side, the knife hanging limply from his hand. "I am going... to cut you open... and carve up your soul, Pearce"

"You're insane," Wallace said, exhaustion wearing down on him. "Why do you – wait, what did you just say?"

Chara tossed his knife up and caught it before he twirled it in his hand. "He's asking for me to explain myself?" he asked absently. "Do you want me to detail what it's like to cut flesh from bone?"

"You called me Pearce," Wallace said. "Y-You know who I am?"

Chara's expression changed, something in his eyes hardened before he took off and ran straight for him.

"Elgyem, the field, okay?" Wallace asked as he backed up to the fence before he looked to elgyem.

Elgyem nodded and raised his hands, the green digits on his hands lighting up. "Elgy!"

Wallace gripped the balcony and steeled himself as Chara rushed him. Time seemed to slow as Wallace watched each one of Chara's footsteps, counting how much more he could watch before Chara reached him. When the number dropped from four to three, Wallace tightened his grip on the balcony and jumped. He tucked his legs in as they passed Chara who was still running ahead, a second too late to stop him from jumping over.

Wallace felt his heart leap into his throat as his free fall began. The drop from the balcony to the stadium wasn't far, but enough to kill or at least make running away impossible. Wallace felt the wind rush him and the ground grow closer before his body twisted and the sight of the ground faded behind a wall of bright lights.

Only a moment later did the ground reappear before him, closer, but when he hit it didn't hurt. After elgyem's teleport, Wallace stumbled forward, his legs tangling, but he regained his balance and sprinted forward. "Good job, elgyem!" he said as he glanced back to the balcony. He could clearly make out the sight of Chara standing against the railing.

Wallace turned back and slammed into the body on the field. He gasped and let out a throat straining yell before he realized the body before him wasn't moving. Despite being under the only remaining light on the field it took Wallace a moment to understand what he had run into. One of the training dummies from his lab had been propped up in the center of the field.

"Tom, get him!" Chara yelled from the distance.

Wallace narrowed his eyes on the dummy to a name tag that had been pinned to its chest: Hi! My name is Tom!

"Psycho," he breathed as he bent over and rested his hands on his knees, allowing himself just one moment to breathe. Opening his eyes the ground was spinning slightly, his head swimming with a range of emotions, and as he straightened up he saw a boy move from behind the dummy.

His hair was as black as the night and his skin was paper white with bright blue eyes narrowed into slits at Wallace. He couldn't have been much older than Wallace and not much taller either. Wallace's eyes fell to his hands, expecting for him to have a knife, but his large hands were empty and flat at his sides.

The boy opened his mouth, and for a split second, Wallace thought he might be safe, but that thought became dashed and divided by an almost inhuman roar the boy let out. He moved quickly, arms out and hands fixed into claws at Wallace.

Wallace darted forward, his eyes fixed on the gate that wrapped around the stadium, it was far, but if he was faster he could climb it and run. One second Wallace was heading for the gate and the next the boy had a hold of his bag. Wallace let out a high yelp as his feet left the ground as the boy tugged him back. He watched spinarak and elgyem fly forward away from him as the boy used his weight against him before he was slammed up against the dummy.

Wallace tried to grab hold but was yanked away before his brain could relay the message and was slammed against the ground on his back. There was a sickening and wet crack and Wallace let out a pained cry, not for himself, but for his egg. He shifted slightly and knew how close he was to the ground his egg had broken.

The boy loomed over Wallace before he reached down and grabbed the front of his jacket and dragged him across the ground. Wallace cried futile tears for his egg as the boy dragged him down, his bag riding up on his back before he flipped him over. Wallace's eyes spilled over with tears once he saw the glistening pool of fluid on the turf that led to him a thinning trail.

He coughed out as a foot landed squarely on his back and pinned him to the ground. In the distance, Wallace could see Chara sprinting across the field. As Wallace started to openly weep he dropped his head to the ground, his face landing on a patch of grass slick with the goo from his shattered egg. Chara became nothing more than a blob of colors as his eyes swelled with tears, but before he surrendered to the idea of Chara killing him, a streak of red crossed the field and ignited the field before him with fire.

The weight on his back vanished and Wallace rubbed at his eyes as he watched fireballs rain down on the field, forming a circle around him. Wallace pushed himself up slightly when a glint of light flashed before him and elgyem and spinarak landed in the grass. He dove for them and wrapped his pokémon in his arms.

The feeling of a hand on his shoulder caused Wallace to panic and whip around. He balled his hand up just before it connected with a solid thunk against the cheek of a boy crouched behind him. Wallace pulled his throbbing hand to his chest as he looked at the sight of Johnny, the boy from the library, clutching his face.

"I'm here to help," Johnny said, extending his free hand to Wallace.

Wallace eyed the outstretched hand before the sound of wings flapping brought his attention back to Johnny. A large pokémon with twisted and tangled fuzz on its upper body and a black and blue abdomen floated behind Johnny with six wings like fire flapping behind it.

"Volcarona scared those guys off, but we should go!" Johnny said before he recalled his pokémon.

In the moment Johnny wasn't paying attention Wallace, he grabbed the boy's hand, gripping it for dear life. "Elgyem, take us to the ICO."

Johnny whipped back towards Wallace, a look of confusion on his face before the scene of the burning stadium faded to black and they were dropped onto the hard tile floor of the ICO lobby. Wallace placed his palms flat on the tile and welcomed the familiar smell of the lobby.

"Wally?"

Wallace craned his neck up and found Izumi standing across the room, propped against the main desk. "I've been calling you all day. What's wrong? You sound out of breath. Who's farmer John?" he asked.

"My name is John," Johnny said from beside Wallace as he looked over the pattern of his tan lines. "Who're you?"

"I'm Wallace's father," Izumi said as he crossed the lobby and helped Wallace to his feet. "And there's something really important you need to see."

"No, no, we need to call public safety," Wallace slurred as he practically fell the moment Izumi had him standing. "We have to call!"

"I don't care what kind of college fun you two were having, but you and I have real problems," Izumi said as he gripped Wallace by the front of his jacket and shoved him towards the desk. "There's a video," Izumi said.

"What?" Wallace breathed, struggling to focus on anything before Izumi grabbed his head and angled it towards the flatscreen.

John appeared beside him and picked up the remote on the desk and turned the volume up on a news report in progress.

"– through an anonymous tip about evidence that may help bring the missing person's case of Andrew Gates to a close. Last night authorities in Lumiose were made aware of activity on Andrew Gate's PokéView account. Prior to his disappearance, Andrew was the world's most subscribed to personality on the app and used his account to document his journey through several regions. The amount of support and attention paid to Andrew's account has only increased following news of his disappearance. Police were made aware of a video that had been uploaded to Andrew's account early on August 20th, the day Andrew is believed to have gone missing, just one day after his birthday. The video is currently marked private and therefore not viewable to the public."

* * *

End of Chapter Seventeen

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ New characters! **Vivian Summers** by **Oly In Flight** , **Sienna Oakburn** by **The Awkward Trumpet** , and **Hunter Wright** by **Farla.**

 **Question of the Chapter #16:** What do you think Andrew's final video could be?


	18. Family Affair

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter** **Eighteen** **–** **Family Affair**

 _The agony of death and birth._ _– T.S. Eliot_

* * *

A storm raged around the island that contained Radix University. To the north of campus, the elongated halls of the Health and Wellness Center, like the arms of a giant mollusk, extended out across a water logged lawn behind Hawthorn Library. Each of the building's many windows shone pale yellow light into the heavy downpour, only managing to illuminate a few feet of grass around the building.

Wallace's half-open eyes followed a line between tiles as he walked back to the entry into the intensive care unit. The ICU, like most other units, was stationed inside one hallway lined with rooms that split into two separate halls at the end with a nurses station, a glass box with two protruding walls, at the fork in the hall.

Over the course of the three hours he'd spent inside the H&W Center, Wallace had walked over every line in between every tile in the hall. Briefly, the thought occurred to him to leave and venture through the lobby and walk the lines of other units, follow in the literal footsteps of men and women who had paced as a way to pass time while they waited for news, but getting the nurses to let him stay in the unit had been challenging enough.

The sound of a lock clicking pulled Wallace's attention from the tiles and towards the left fork in the hall, the burn unit. A nurse, a young woman wearing a pair of pink scrubs, adjusted folded bedding under her arm before she walked to the end of the hall and vanished through a pair of sliding doors.

Wallace reached up to where elgyem slept, his small body stretched out and draped over Wallace's shoulder, and rubbed a circle on his pokémon's forehead. Casting his eyes over the nurse's station and down the hall of the ICU, Wallace focused his sights on a glaring red light above a set of sliding doors, a match to the ones in the burn unit. Although he hadn't explored all of the building, it seemed to be a safe bet that each unit had a similar room where the most severe cases were taken for treatment and surgery.

After catching the end of the news report about Andrew's last private video, a weak cry from inside his bag startled Wallace and had Johnny dragging him from the dorm. Once they were at the Health and Wellness Center, Wallace laid his bag on the information desk, sputtering words and incomplete sentences to the nurse on duty about what had happened.

Being slammed on his back had shattered the egg, but the baby inside hadn't given up. When he opened the bag, peeling the fabric apart, Wallace saw a pale blue body writhing around inside amongst a mess of egg shell and amniotic fluid, gasping for air.

The nurse had taken the bag, her face becoming ashen when she peered inside, and sprinted into the ICU, vanishing into the room at the end of the hall and triggering the red light to turn on. She returned an hour later with news of surgery, but than optimistic odds for survival.

As Wallace turned his back on the ICU, the glare of the red light too much to focus on anymore, the lines on the floor taking him towards the lobby, a pair of sliding doors down the hall parted and two nurses rushed through. Between them, Wallace spotted a long gurney covered in white sheets with a thrashing body on top.

In the spirit of inquiry, Wallace crept down the hall, curious to know who was on the gurney. A majority of the rooms in the ICU were occupied by resting pokémon and the nurses occasionally left their box to check vitals or whatever nurses did when they made their rounds, but during the entire time he'd been there, they hadn't brought anyone in. But his interest in the patient vanished when the screams started.

Loud like a siren, and as grating as nails on a board, the patient twisted and turned on the stretcher, his mouth opened wide as if invisible hands were wrenching it apart. The sound of his cries raised Wallace's skin into bumps and for a second his legs went weak as the gurney rolled by. Wallace collapsed into the wall, his limbs going numb, as he got a better look at the patient.

He was on fire. Half of his face was gone, eaten away by flames and what the fire left was blotched blood red and raw. He was thrashing still, like a trapped animal, as if the fire was still there, eating away at what was left of him.

An invisible rope seemed to tug at the boy's navel as he arched his back, his stomach curving towards the ceiling. His eyes opened wide, matching his mouth, and another high screech came from his mouth. Wallace winced and cupped his hands to his ears, his sudden movement startling elgyem awake, but the sound still reached him. It was almost inhuman and too loud, a movie track played at maximum volume.

For the briefest of seconds, Wallace locked eyes with the burned victim and realized two things. First, he knew why he was screaming. The fire was still there, but nowhere the nurses would ever be able to treat it. The flames had scorched through his skin and were igniting his bones and melting him from inside. The second was that he knew him. His hair, what remained, was light blonde and burned at the ends and splatters of freckles dotted his cheeks, standing out amongst the flesh that had been charred away.

Nat Freelily was on the stretcher, his body a picture definition of burns to the degree of which Wallace didn't recognize.

The nurses rolled to a stop as one of the them tried to press Nat back onto the gurney, though the appearance of his skin gave her pause. Wallace could remember the color of Nat's skin, like toast, but on the gurney, Nat's exposed chest only made Wallace think of the scales of a water-type burned by an open flame. Wallace watched the nurse hesitate against making contact with Nat before she pressed gingerly onto his shoulders with the tips of her fingers. Nat roared out in pain, but fell back on the gurney and after more thrashing went limp, his chest rising and falling with shaking intakes of air.

When the sight of Nat became too much for Wallace to see he turned to the main doors as Nurse Joie, the same woman who had looked over him after the safari incident, came through trailed by the hovering figure of a large grey pokémon and a smaller pink-purple pokémon that floated beside her.

"Ladies, take him to the emergency room please," Nurse Joie said as she nodded her head to the pair of nurses. Joie smoothed out the front of her pink dress and white coat before she turned to the pokémon at her side. "Musharna, take his aggron in with them too."

"Muu." Musharna let out a soft cry in response to the nurse before kicked through the air, as if it were paddling through water, and headed down the hall. The large grey pokémon that looked to be coated in black and silver plates of armor floated behind the musharna, both of them taking the left split and following the nurses to the end of the burn unit.

Wallace's mouth fell open, his lower jaw quivering as he glanced down the hall. Even after the nurses and Musharna were gone through the last door in the burn unit, he could still smell the scent of burned flesh. With shaky hands Wallace pinched his nose and shut his eyes, trying to rid his senses of the smell. Elgyem made soft beeping noises beside him and prodded Wallace in the cheek. Wallace grunted in reply and shook off elgyem's hand, bile rising in his throat and his stomach seizing against the urge to purge itself.

"Wallace, what are you doing here?" Nurse Joie asked, stopping at the corner beside him.

Wallace swallowed down the fizzing watery sensation flooding his jaw that told him to vomit over the white walls and tiles of the unit as he regarded the nurse. "Uh, egg." Wallace's chin quivered as he forced himself to swallow the smell and taste of charred skin next. "Egg. I – I brought in an egg."

Nurse Joie's eyes darkened and she nodded. "Oh, the one that broke, the premature baby," she said before she placed a hand on Wallace's shoulder and looked down the hall to the emergency door, bathed in the red light of the surgery light. "I saw the form earlier. I know my doctors are doing everything they can."

Wallace nodded and felt his knees go weak when the nurse removed her hand. She made it sound so easy. Trust in her doctors to save the life of an infant and still developing pokémon that he nearly flattened. Wallace clutched at his stomach, images of his pokémon squirming and kicking helplessly in its own fluids, oblivious to the world of pain it had just been born into or the life and death circumstances of its premature birth.

"It's not fair," he whined. Tears pricked at Wallace's eyes at he imagined the tiny pokémon, scared, fighting for its life, and in pain it couldn't understand. Tears spilled over Wallace's lids at the thought of how unfair life was, for an innocent pokémon to be forced upon and have its life almost ended before it began. Like the flash of a bulb, the same image, the pokémon's light blue body, no matter than a shoe wriggling inside his bag, its weak and yet fully formed vocal cords straining to cry out for its unimaginable pain. Its cry, a cry its parent might know how to respond to, or even a real trainer would have reacted too instantly.

"Wallace," Nurse Joie said.

The sound of her voice startled Wallace and when he opened his eyes, blinking through the collected moisture, he was staring up at her from the floor. He'd collapsed, his legs folded under him and his palms sore and red pressed against the floor.

"Stay strong, Wallace," Nurse Joie said as she grabbed his hands and pulled him to his feet. "They're going to do everything in their power to save your pokémon, we're not in the business of letting lives, human or pokémon, slip through our fingers. And when your pokémon makes it through this, it's going to need you, more than any other pokémon on your team needs you. Okay?" she said, glancing to elgyem and then fixing Wallace in her stare.

"Okay," he said, his voice wet. Wallace swiped at his eyes and rubbed in the moisture on his cheeks. Down the hall, the surgery light was ever present and down the burn unit, a red light came to life as well. From his place a few feet from the nurse's station, with a view down both halls, two glaring red eyes had a view of him as well. "Nat, is he okay?" Wallace asked, unable to tear his eyes away from the lights.

Nurse Joie walked to the nurse's station and grabbed several clipboards from holders hanging on the glass. "I can't discuss medical care with you," she said as he glanced over the boards and turned to the burn unit. "But Wallace, his brother was behind us on our way in with Arlette, if you see him please don't let him into the burn unit. Tell him I'll come talk to him shortly."

Wallace pressed himself onto the wall, the corner edge digging into his cheek as he watched Nurse Joie strut down the hall, her walk full of power and determination as if death didn't exist within her walls. The nurse vanished into the room at the end of the hall, Nat's screams slipped through during the moment the doors opened.

The silence of the hall slammed down over Wallace once the nurse was gone, but lasted only a moment before the doors from the lobby parted. Wallace rolled against the wall and saw Don and Arlette fumbling through the door, Arlette trying, without success, to keep Don out.

The pair looked ragged and exhausted, their clothes soaked through and clinging to their bodies. Their hair dripped rain water and was plastered their pale faces as hair and skin dripping with water as Don struggled to tear away from Arlette.

"Don, please!" Arlette squeaked as Don broke her hold on him when he ripped his arm out of her grasp. "I can get the nurse for you, just please wait!"

"No!" Don barked over his shoulder at her.

Wallace watched the boy throw himself at the first door he came to, trying the knob before he pressed his face to the glass window. "Where did they take him?" After looking into the room for just a second Don darted across the hall and did the same to the next door and repeated the motions until he came to the fork and lunged at Wallace, his hands snagging into the front of Wallace's shirt. "Wallace! My brother, my brother he's here, they brought him through here didn't they? Did you see where they took him?"

Wallace pulled his head back from Don as the boy pleaded at him, his hands forming tight fists against his chest. "I saw Nat, he's fine. The nurse brought him through," he said, his voice breaking on the lie.

"Where is he?" Don asked, his grip loosening. "Can you take me to him? Do you know where they took him?" he asked as he backed up and ran his fingers through the thick jet black mop of his hair.

Wallace's eyes flicked across Don's features, absorbing every ounce of uncertainty and fear on the planes of his face before he looked past him to Arlette who only shook her head. "The nurse said she'll find you and talk to you, I don't know anything," he said.

"I don't believe you," Don said, his voice like a child's whimper. "Why won't anyone tell me anything? I just have to see that he's okay."

"They'll let you see him when they're finished," Arlette said. "You have to be patient."

"How long will that be? When they're finished, what does that mean? Why can't I just see him? I need to see my brother! Why is that so hard to understand?" Don asked. "What time is it?"

"Sometime after midnight," Wallace said before he yawned, for the first time that night feeling exhausted after a day of classes and his trainer's lab in the stadium.

"I can get you rooms for the night if you want to stay," Arlette said, fiddling with her thumbs and dropping her gaze to the floor. "I'll tell Nurse Joie you're staying, she'll come see you right away when she's ready."

"Not until I see him," Don said, his voice stern and deep.

"Don, I don't think –" Wallace said before he glanced down the burn unit hallway. "Maybe you should just wait."

"Is he that way?" Don asked, bumping into Wallace as he rounded the corner. He started down the hall, glancing into rooms along the white hall before he took off in a sprint for the end.

Wallace glanced to Arlette before he took off down the hall after Don, reaching the door after Don had already been standing in front of the window for a good half minute. Don emitted a low moan before he clamped a hand to his mouth. Wallace looked over to him and saw the tears swelling in his eyes as he squeezed his hand over his mouth before he turned away and sobbed.

Wallace moved in front of the window and peered into an all white operating room. Nat was laying prone on an operating table and his aggron was beside him, separated by a thin swinging curtain. The room was a fury of motion, doctors and nurses were gathered around the two tables and others were gathering in conversation and then separating. For a moment, Wallace thought their tight circles were for prayer.

Nurse Joie approached Nat with a pair of small scissors and began snipping away his clothing. Wallace watched, transfixed, as she cut away his shirt and pulled it away from his blackened body. Nat moaned and cried with every strip of burned fabric that left his body. Joie handed the scissors off to another nurse before her musharna came to her side and began emitting a thick pink gas into the air.

A hand on his back made Wallace jump and when he turned Arlette was there, flinching back from him. "We should go," she said.

Wallace nodded and started back down the hall with Arlette and Don trailing behind. At the fork in the hall, Wallace looked to his own operating room, the red light still shining, the ominous reminder of an ongoing surgery.

Arlette escorted the boys from the ICU in silence, moving on auto pilot as she walked Don and Wallace through the lobby and past doors only employees could access until they reached the residential unit, another long hallway lined with rooms and bathed in soft yellow light.

Arlette let him into one room and opened the one opposite for Don, who vanished inside and slammed the door shut without so much as a word. Shutting his own door, Wallace fell back into the familiar surroundings of pristine white walls and a single window that looked out into the thick of the thunderstorm.

The bed pressed against the wall was hard and its sheets were stiff and smelled of bleach, on par to what he remembered. Still, the day had been long and tense and the exhaustion was a relief. Slowly, Wallace laid on the bed, allowing elgyem to crawl down onto the pillow with him, while his mind wandered to Izumi.

In the haste of leaving he'd only said a few words to the forger about Chara, surely after three hours Izumi would have left, but with Chara out there he wondered if Izumi was worried as well. But his last thought before drifting off wasn't of Izumi, Chara, or Andrew, it was of Cosmo. Don was there, across the hall, but he wondered if Cosmo had been told yet about Nat.

* * *

The slam of a door jolted Wallace from his brief and uncomfortable rest on the Center's bed. Shooting up, a patch of drool warm against his cheek, Wallace registered the lack of sunlight in the room, elgyem's snoring, the stiffness of his muscles, and the smell of food nearby.

As he stretched out and let his feet touch the ice cold tile of his temporary room, it was neither hunger nor peace he felt, but a horrible sensation of pessimism. As Wallace pulled elgyem into his lap he watched the clock above the door read to him that the night was just ending and sunrise was soon, but he could feel the problems of the previous day still close behind.

Reaching into his back pocket, Wallace pulled out a folded page of Arlette's diary he'd grabbed before lab yesterday. As he unfolded it, the idea occurred to him reading about Arlette's love for Andrew wouldn't solve his problem, but a distraction was a distraction.

* * *

 _August 10th – Something's Wrong_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _The trip is turning out to be a lot like the last one we took. Andrew and I hiked this same_ _r_ _oute nine years ago before he left Kalos. It wasn't a fun time for me. The Nature Trail is long and swampy and rain_ _y_ _and hot, but least this time I knew what to expect. But it's not the path… It's Andrew, he's different._

 _He got a call on his holocaster last night and vanished into the woods to answer it… It was like he didn't want me to hear it or something._

 _I forgot about it this morning and while he left use the restroom i answered another call he got. I just wanted to tell them that he wasn't around at the moment, but I was sure he'd be back soon. I answered, but whoever was calling didn't say anything and then Andrew came sprinting out of the woods. I thought he was running from something, but he came right for me and grabbed the holocaster out of my hands and asked me what I thought I was doing._

 _I'm so confused. It feels like he's hiding something… But Andrew isn't like that at all._

 _We've set up camp for the night and he's_ _been_ _talking to me, kind of, but it still feels like something isn't right. I don't want to ask and make him upset again… I hope we can turn this trip around._

 _Truly (Confused) Yours, Arlette B._

* * *

There was a light knock outside before the door handle jiggled and the door opened slightly, the top of a white-blonde head of hair poking inside. "A-Are you decent?" Arlette asked. "I have breakfast."

Wallace slid off the bed and pulled the door open, revealing Arlette cowering in the hall carrying a wide silver tray with several plates on it. Some kind of meat, a bowl of berries, eggs, and several breakfast pastries were aligned on the tray, none of which looked appealing to Wallace, not while the scent of Nat's burning flesh was still on his mind.

"Thanks," he said, taking the tray and sliding it onto one of the counters in the room. While the sight of breakfast turned Wallace's stomach, the smell of it snapped elgyem from his slumber. The psychic-type climbed out of Wallace's arms and romped around the table, eyeing the tray before he went after the bowl of berries. "What's going on?" Wallace asked as he put a bit of distance between him and Arlette, vaguely aware he might have had morning breath and crust in his eyes.

Arlette inhaled but seemed to swallow down her reply and instead looked over her shoulder. Across the hall, Nurse Joie was standing outside Don's room, her arms crossed in a professional, but distant, manner as she talked down to Don who looked to be on the verge of tears.

Their conversation ended with a swift slam of the door on Don's part. Nurse Joie stared at the door for a moment before she turned and regarded Arlette and Wallace with a tight smile. Her eyes passed over Wallace for a breath and her mouth twitched before she spoke. "Wallace," she said curtly and walked off down the hall.

"What was that about?" Wallace asked, his eyes focusing on Don's door. "Does she have news about Nat?"

Arlette's mouth parted and Wallace watched an explanation form between her round teeth, but she clammed up and sighed. "She makes me promise, sign a form, that says I can't talk to anyone about patients or their pokémon."

"Okay, what about me?" Wallace asked.

"You?" Arlette's brow shot up and her head tipped to the side. "I don't understand?"

"I brought a pokémon in last night, do you know what happened to it? How it's doing?" he asked.

Arlette's head shook frantically. "Nurse Joie hasn't said anything, but if it's in the main operating room the light is still on. But that could just mean it's resting."

Despite Arlette's attempt at comfort, Wallace swallowed down the news that the doctors had been working on his premature pokémon for nearly eight hours. "Thanks."

Arlette's lips spread into a fleeting smile before she bobbed her head and backed up. "I should get going," she said.

Wallace watched Arlette retreat down the hall and out of the residential unit before he backed up into his room and looked over the breakfast tray. Elgyem was polishing off the last of the berries and had two pastries in orbit around him, his next victims.

Wallace skimmed his hand over the food, everything was hot and smell fine, but the thought of digesting it didn't sit right. He looked over the last pastry elgyem hadn't claimed and poked it, but the moment the top layer flaked off and crumbled under his fingers, what little appetite he had vanished, his mind flashing to the sight of Nat's skin charred flesh.

Digging into his pocket, Wallace retrieved spinarak's ball and released the pokémon onto the table. The bug-type took no time in attacking the tray of food, pinching and pulling at the meat before he scuttled over the tray and tested the pastry.

Leaving his team to eat, a mix of curiosity and empathy caused Wallace to leave his room and rap on Don's door, and after he didn't answer, Wallace tried the knob. The door was unlocked and Wallace peered inside. He found Don sitting, knees pulled to his chest, at the top of the bed, eyes brimming with tears.

"Are you okay?" Wallace asked. He stepped inside and slowly shut the door behind him, careful not to push too hard in case the loud noise triggered Don. Wallace stayed by the counters along the opposite wall from Don's bed and watched as Don seemed to tense under his gaze, his hands clenched and shaking.

"Fine," Don breathed.

Wallace bit at the inner corner of his mouth before he wet his lips and looked to the window. The storm outside was gone, or at least much quieter. "Did they tell you what happened to him?"

Don sniffled and bobbed his head. "The nurse just told me." Don shifted on the bed and stretched his legs out before curling them back in. "It was the fire at the stadium. Students saw it and went to put it out, keep it from spreading and reaching campus. People say they saw Nat nearby and that he went back and was trying to get students away, he didn't get everyone. There was a freshman who got too close and his clothes caught on fire, they put it out, but then Nat was too close. The uh – the wind from the bay, it caught the flames and spread it further across the ground."

Wallace felt the bottom of his stomach fall out and splat on the floor. His jaw quivered as he searched for the right combination of words to form an acceptable apology, but nothing sounded right in his head. "Sorry," he said, managing the most pathetic five lettered word in the world that was supposed to uphold an entire list of condolences and grief.

Don wiped at his face with the open palms of his hands, smearing his tears across his cheeks. "It's not as bad as it looks," he said, turning to face Wallace. "His lungs weren't damaged. Nurse Joie said that was important, she said that was very important," Don said, repeating it as if he himself needed convincing the factor made a difference in Nat's condition. "A-Apparently, it's something to do with inhaling the flames, or the gas, or the fumes, I – I can't remember, but it's good. He was screaming, and that was a good sign."

"Sorry." Wallace swallowed after the word bubbled from his lips again, thankful Don turned back to looking at the bed, unsure of what his expression might give away. That even though he hadn't lit it, in some way he was responsible for the fire? "I'll go, I'll let you sleep, or – I don't know." Wallace tripped over his feet heading to the door that seemed miles away. Once he had the knob in his hand he was grateful for the escape, but Don's voice stopped him from throwing himself into the hall.

"Stay," Don said.

Wallace listened to the sound of the bed shifting under Don's weight and when he turned back Don was leaning against the brick wall, his legs dangling over the edge of the mattress.

"I don't really want to be alone. I can't stop thinking about Nat," Don said, his eyes swelling again. "They won't let me see him yet."

Wallace's heart pounded as he shut the door and inched across the room. With Don on the far left of the bed that left him with the middle or the right, the latter seeming too obvious as a choice, so Wallace eased down near the center of the bed. Instantly he regretted not sitting on the right side, despite how it might have looked like he was trying to stay as far away from Don as possible. Though the Center's beds were fine to sleep on, with two people on one, he realized just how small they actually were.

"So, come here often?" Don asked and quickly laughed, but quickly shook his head and looked to his hands.

Wallace followed with pithy laughter, unsure where Don's state of mind was at. "Second time. But something tells me it won't be my last," Wallace said.

"I didn't really mean that I don't wish anyone had to come here." Don laughed again, even shorter than before and snider. "This place is awful."

"Have you been here a lot?" Wallace asked while he attempted to shift to the right side of the bed, but every little move made the springs beneath him groan.

Don's chest expanded with the intake of air before he sighed and slumped over. "I was practically a regular last year. Nat would follow me around campus and lead me down some alley or behind a building and make me battle him. Completely wipe the floor with my team and send me here. The nurses don't care really if you're here a lot. It's their job to heal your team and they don't see anything wrong with someone who comes along often. They'll suggest buying some medicine and a training program because they assume your pokémon are weak, but they have no reason to think something is up, so they never ask."

"Why not just tell anyway?" Wallace asked.

"If the university felt he was targeting me or being cruel he'd get into trouble and then he'd make my life hell," Don said. "And not just at school, but at home too. It only lasted for a little bit though, after the Roses he wasn't able to battle anymore, even in secret."

Wallace nodded, remembering the brief slip-up Don and Cosmo had given him that Nat wasn't allowed to battle on campus because of the Roses and that Travis from class mentioned the Roses had eyes everywhere. "What did he do to get on the Roses bad side?" Wallace asked, relenting to the fact he was stuck in the center of the bed and mentally going over the exact points on his body that were in contact with Dons.

"Wallace," Don said as he shrugged his shoulders and scooted back until he was pressed against the wall.

Wallace stared at the floor and realized the ill timing of his question. "I'm sorry," he said, glancing back to Don, whose face was hidden by shadows. "You don't have to tell me."

"It's fine," Don said. "It's just that it's not something we talk about, not even at home, but – I don't know. Maybe it's this place and the fact that my brother might never be the same again. Or the fact we're both stuck here waiting on bad news," Don said before he sat up straight, moonlight falling over his face. "I'm sorry. Nurse Joie told me about your egg, I didn't mean that I'm sure your baby is fine."

Wallace shook his head, brushing off Don's apology, but he wondered why Nurse Joie had told Don about the egg, but not Arlette.

"I just feel like I can tell you things, or talk to you about things, and they not be used against me," Don said. "You know, we think we've got it bad, but there have been students and parents in this building who aren't guaranteed any good news. I had a friend last year, his name was Ian, and he was gay, and Nat did not approve. Still doesn't."

"What happened to him?" Wallace asked as he picked at a loose string from the sheet under him.

"Nat did what Nat does, he bullied him. Picked on him, called him names, would slap the books out of his hands, write things on blackboards of his classrooms, follow him, corner him. He did just, just the worst things you could think of, all without ever actually laying a finger on him," Don said.

Wallace pressed his chin to his shoulder as he watched pain flash across Don's face. "Is Nat homophobic?" he asked.

Don smiled, tight and quick, and bobbed his head. "He bullied Ian for a while, pretty much all of the first semester," he said, his words heavier and more full of emotion. "And it was the day before winter vacation and Ian's parents were here to get him. He wasn't around, but I ran into in the ICO and talked to them for a bit before we realized he wasn't answering his phone. So I took them to his room, thinking maybe he fell asleep or got distracted cleaning his room. That was Ian's thing, he liked to clean, said it help him think and relax. But when we got to his room – " Don cut off and exhaled a long breath.

"Don," Wallace said softly, seeing the pain spilling from Don's eyes. With bars of moonlight slicing across his face in rough lines, illuminating the dark look in his eyes and the wetness to his voice, he knew where the story was headed. "It's okay. I'm sorry I asked."

Don regarded him with a wide smile and a nod. "Other than the word of people like myself, no one could really say what pushed Ian to that point. Nat denies it so there was nothing the university could do as far as placing blame. Their bullying policy is strict, but Ian never reported anything and Nat never did anything to make the teachers suspicious. So the university just pushed the counseling groups and urged students to always ask for help."

"What about the writing on the boards?" Wallace asked. "If someone else saw it they'd wonder what it was about or who it was for. A professor wouldn't let that go."

"Yeah." Don smiled again, but shook his head and looked to his hands in his lap. "After the first few times it happened Ian started getting to classes early and erasing it. He wasn't out and was scared of random people knowing. Nat only found out from a message Ian left me. He doesn't know, but I'm the one who went to the Roses and told them about what he did to Ian."

"You just said there was no proof other than he said she said," Wallace said. "Why would the Roses believe you?"

"They didn't want to," Don said before he hugged himself and leaned against the wall, casting his eyes on the ceiling. "They knew what Nat had done to me, all the battling and picking on me, so when I went to them about Ian they figured I was just trying to get Nat in trouble for something without admitting that I didn't like being bullied by my brother. But the Roses aren't like the university, even though they didn't want to, they listened to the me and felt it was good enough. They built a case against Nat and afterwards decided his punishment for driving Ian to that point was that he wasn't allowed to battle on campus anymore," Don said. "It's a punishment for him because he fails every assignment that requires him to battle. He can't participate in tournaments, practicals, trainer exams, labs, none of it. His grades have been ruined because of it and he won't actually graduate for two more additional years because of it. And pretty much everyone who knows about the Roses knows what he did. It's not a secret, but it's not exactly public either."

Don sniffled and swiped at his nose. "Nat is the announcer for the tournaments, and I think that's why he went back to the stadium to put the fire out and why he was trying to get people away. It's all he has left, the closest he's getting to battling while he's in school. He's not a bad person."

Don's words sank into Wallace, conflicting the guilt and sadness he felt for Nat being burned, though he wasn't sure if severe bullying was enough to make him stop feeling sorry for Nat.

"So yeah, me going to the Roses was a way to get justice, or revenge, for Ian, and him struggling to pass his classes is worth being picked on," Don said. "And what I go through now is nothing compared to what my life would be if he knew I was behind the Roses going after him."

"Serena is his girlfriend, but she's in charge of the Roses. How does that work?" Wallace asked.

"She wasn't in charge when that decision was handed down," Don said. "She was like Ian, a victim, and in need of the Roses to help solve it. That got her involved with them and then they made her the leader."

"What happened to her?" Wallace asked.

"I shouldn't tell other people's business, sorry." Don pursed his lips and eased back on the bed with a sigh. "It's personal, I shouldn't even know really."

Wallace nodded and waved it off. "Everyone's got secrets," he said, feeling the truth behind his words more than ever. "Some are really personal, I get it."

"What are yours?"

Wallace jumped at the question that seemed to roll so freely off Don's tongue. "And some are _really_ personal," he repeated.

Don shrugged, smiled, and threw his hands up in defense. "Okay, fine," he laughed. "I won't pry."

Wallace and Don got quiet, the only sound that reached into the small brick room was the wind outside. Finally, Wallace slid off the bed and headed for the door. "Bathroom," he said, not waiting for a response.

Outside the room, the scent of the hospital slammed into him, clearing away the scent of flowers that somehow filled Don's room. Wallace passed his door, deciding to let his pokémon finished their breakfast and the idea of getting his shoes not interesting him as he followed the trusty tile lines out of the residential unit and out into the lobby. Wallace followed the tiles until they led him back through the doors and into the intensive care unit.

A familiar face to the nurses, none of the workers making their rounds gave him a second glance as he padded down the hall and headed for the nurse's station. Despite being allowed to stay in the hall because of his investment with what was happening in the surgery room, access to patient information was still off-limits, so Wallace took to pacing in front of the nurse's station and stealing glances at a large marker-board inside the room to find the last name of FREELILY and a room number.

At the fork in the hall, Wallace noted the red light above the burn unit doors were off, but his was on, a singular glaring red light, the kind of red that lived inside someone's eyelid while facing the sun with their eyes closed.

Despite easily being able to peer into the room while Nat was treated, Wallace's fear of what he might see eclipsed his curiosity to know what was going on inside the surgery room for his baby. Whether the view was good or bad, the end result was all that mattered. Life or death, nothing else mattered.

Turning down into the burn unit, Wallace read off room numbers before he approached the one with Nat inside. Just a few doors down, the door to the room he needed swung open and a nurse stepped out, holding the door as an older couple stepped out.

Wallace slowed to a stop as the nurse shut the door, but looked inside until the woman said something to her. The couple was aged, not terribly old, but old enough to be parents, Nat's parents, Wallace thought. The man was tall with blond hair like Nat and Cosmo, the mom a little smaller with blonde hair, though Wallace could see darker streaks near her scalp. The pair nodded and looked solemnly at the nurse while she spoke before she turned and gestured for them to follow her.

Wallace moved to the wall, even though he wasn't in anyone's way, and let the three of the pass before he made his move towards Nat's room. Wallace threw himself into the room, eyes on the hall in case the nurse turned and saw him, but she didn't. The Freelily parents and the nurse vanished down the hall and as Wallace backed into the room, he kept his eyes so trained on the hall he failed to notice someone standing over the bed.

A girl, average in every way, with tangles of blonde hair framing her tear streaked face stood over Nat, her hands grasping one of his. She wore an oversized sweater that looked homemade and baggy sweats and some kind of bulbous green accessory on her neck, but the longer Wallace stared and the more he narrowed his eyes he realized the accessory was a pokémon, small with a bitten leaf around its head.

"W-Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was light and her eyes were wide as if Wallace was the grim reaper, there to claim Nat.

"Uh, I'm uh, a friend," Wallace said, wishing he could charge back through the door and leave. He hadn't expected for anyone else to be in the room and now the entire idea of visiting Nat seemed inappropriate with his family around. "I'm sorry, I saw his parents leave, I thought he'd be alone. Sorry, I'll leave." Wallace backed up to the door but paused with his hand on the knob. "Who are you? I mean, how do you know Nat? Are you his sister?" he asked, she was certainly blonde enough to be a sister, but the thick curls over the straight locks Nat, Don, and Cosmo all had said otherwise.

"I'm his cousin," she said as she looked down on him. "I go to school nearby, not in Kalos, but it's not far. My aunt and uncle called my parents and they told me what happened. I came as soon as I could." The girl dissolved into sobs and her legs gave out. She sank to the ground and pressed her head to the bed, squeezing Nat's hand to her cheek as she cried.

"I'm so sorry," Wallace said, cursing himself uttering the same sorry he had given Don.

"How long have you known Nat?" she asked, whining.

"Not long," Wallace said as he eased around the room and stood on the other side of the bed. Nat's head was covered in bandages, his mouth and eyes uncovered, giving him a mummy-like appearance. Wrapping covered his chest and upper arms as well as his legs which were elevated into the air by a device hanging from the ceiling. "I'm Wallace," he said, unable to take his eyes off Nat.

The girl sniffled and shifted into a sitting position at the bedside, never letting go of Nat's hand for a moment. Her fingers rubbed patterns into the back of Nat's hand while she studied his bandaged form. "I'm Rosanna," she said.

"You're Don's cousin then," Wallace said, making the obvious connection.

Rosanna pulled her stare off Nat and fixed it on Wallace. "You know Don, what about Cosmo?"

"Yeah, I know Don, he's here right now. I don't know where Cosmo is, but I know him too," Wallace said, unable to stop himself from talking under Rosanna's bright and watery stare, like the surface of a shifting lake.

"Here?" she asked, wiping at her face.

"In the building, we were sleeping in the residential units," he said as he looked back to Nat, his mind working on how to get Rosanna to leave. "If you tell one of the nurses they'll take you to him, I know he wants to see Nat and I'm sure his parents want to see him too."

Rosanna nodded and stood, giving Nat's hand a squeeze before she headed for the door. "I'll be right back!"

Wallace watched her dart from the room and waited for the door to click before he moved towards it. Glancing down the hall through the window, clear of any patrolling nurses, Wallace went back to the bedside and crouched.

From Nat, Wallace looked over all the equipment that surrounded him and all the tubes that were attached to him. Although everything kind of looked the same, Wallace began to assign labels to the tubes. One for easing the pain, one to keep him asleep, one for nutrients, one to fight infections, maybe. But where the tube and magic solvent that would rid him of the burned flesh and heal his mind of being burned alive?

Wallace's thoughts of what the boisterous loudmouth would be like when he woke up were shattered by the jiggling of keys outside the room. In a panic, like a feline scared by a loud noise, Wallace jolted up, but then dropped down and hid under the bed, tangling himself in tubes and wires and surely unplugging something.

From under the bed, Wallace could see simple white tennis shoes enter the room and cross to the bed. The nurse stayed by the side of the bed for a moment before she rounded the end of the bed and came to his side and stopped. "Wallace," she said.

Wallace slammed his eyes shut before he turned his head and realized he hadn't actually concealed himself at all, more than half of his body was visible. Shuffling out, Wallace stared up at Nurse Joie whose arms were crossed and lips pressed together into a hard line. "Sorry," he said. "I just wanted to see him, and I know I shouldn't be here." Wallace got up and dusted himself off, avoiding the nurse's stare at all cost.

"Don told you what happened?" Nurse Joie asked.

"Yeah," he said, focusing on the V Nat's leg made in the air, much like the V in the hall of the ICU. "The wind spread the fire and caught Nat."

"Wallace, you know the thing about trauma victims, they usually lose consciousness at some point," Nurse Joie said as she placed a hand on Wallace's shoulder and guided him closer to the bed. "And when they wake up it's like nothing has happened, they remember the last thing that happened before they blacked out and usually the first thing they'll do is call out for someone, a family member, loved one, last person they were with before they passed out. The Freelily parents have been here for hours and Nat woke up for a bit while his parents were in the room and I hoped he'd call out to them, ease some of their pain and worry, but the first thing he said was your name."

Fire raced down Wallace's spine and the room suddenly felt too loud. All of the machines buzzed and hummed twice as loud and the lights burned brighter overhead, casting a spotlight over him. "M-Me?"

Nurse Joie bit her lip as they were narrowed on him. She didn't look mad, just curious. "You, and I couldn't figure out why. When I talked to Don earlier he said that Nat knew you, seen you around a few times, so it wasn't completely odd, not as bad as if he'd called out of the name of a stranger. But still, odd."

"I don't know what to tell you," Wallace said, choking on his words and spit.

"Were you at the stadium?" Nurse Joie asked, her polite demeanor gone and in its place was the tone of a woman who demanded answers.

Wallace's head bobbed slightly. "I was getting my things together after my lab ended."

"Did you start the fire?" Nurse Joie asked.

"What? No!" Wallace barked back. "You know who it was!" The officers of public safety had swarmed the stadium after the fire and an alert had gone out about Chara, curtesy of Izumi and Johnny. "Why would you even ask me that?"

Nurse Joie looked Wallace up and down again before she walked around the end of the bed again and stepped up to the side. From the adjacent wall, she pulled off a clipboard and flipped through the first few pages. "Once we'd sedated him and cleared away his clothing we were able to study the burns. Because of reckless students, we see lots of burns and we can determine how bad they are and how they started fairly easily. Burns that are direct from a pokémon show a different kind of pattern and tend to penetrate deeper into the flesh, but burns that catch from another object tend to be less severe."

The nurse handed the clipboard over the bed and Wallace took it, trying to make sense of all the boxes and lettering and numeric codes before him. "I don't know what that means, or what it has to do with me," Wallace said.

"Nat's burns are on his face, upper arms, right forearm, and most of his lower body and the burns are consistent with those caused by a direct attack," Nurse Joie said. "From the location of the burns, it looks like Nat was trying to defend or cover himself from a fire-type attack that was heading for him. The same goes for Nat's aggron, its burns are consistent with Nat's. If you haven't considered why it took Nat so long to get into the Center it's because his body was hidden away," she said.

"Hidden?" Wallace asked, nearly dropping the clipboard.

"Nat was found in the stadium, in the locker room area under the stands, not on fire, but burned and in severe pain. A student found him and called it in," the nurse said. "The officers are looking into it and they've come up with a few theories. Combined with what we know about burns it looks like someone set Nat on fire and hid his body in the locker room, either hoping he'd die or not be found right away. Same for his aggron."

"B-B-But you said the wind caught the fire and spread, that's what you told Don!" Wallace said.

"Because the truth would have destroyed him and his parents," Nurse Joie said. "The Freelily's are going through a very trying family affair right now and do you want to tell them that someone set Nat on fire and that you were the first person on his mind when he woke up? If not, and if you don't want me to tell them at this moment, you need to work me with and help me figure this out. Because either someone is after Nat, or you did this to him."


	19. Orphans

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Nineteen – Orphans**

 _And in short, I was afraid - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Standing before the sole window in Nat's room, Wallace watched veins of lightning blink through the grey storm clouds. Though the clouds were lit up from underneath, giving them an orangish-yellow tint as if fires were burning on the horizon, sunrise still seemed far off.

Sporadically, thunder accompanied the flashes of lightning that would illuminate the glass in front of Wallace and turn it shock white for a moment.

Forgetting the critically burned patient in the room, Wallace allowed himself to sink down onto the side of Nat's bed as Nurse Joie's words struck him. Wallace heard the clicking of Nurse Joie's shoes on the floor and briefly registered his name falling from her lips, but it wasn't until she eased down beside him he fully acknowledged her presence.

"Did you hear me?" she asked, her features wide and expectant. "I don't know you very well, and while I don't think – in my honest opinion – that you harmed Nat, the alternative is just as bad. Wallace, if you know something, or there's something you want to tell me, anything about what happened to Nat, please tell me."

Wallace nodded his head weakly before he noticed the nurse glancing to a small watch on her wrist.

"I need to speak with Nat's family," Nurse Joie said as she stood. "You can stay if you like, but a junior nurse will be making her rounds in about twenty minutes, you'll need to be out before then. I'll be in the cafeteria if you need me."

Nurse Joie's footsteps scratched across the floor before she left Wallace and Nat alone. Wallace stayed perched on the side of the bed, mind wandering with possibilities of what had happened to Nat, but unable to nail down one single theory.

In his mind, Don's conviction that Nat was burned helping other students clashed with the nurse's theory that someone set him on fire. Images of Chara, with his knife and menacing smile, flashed into Wallace's mind, slashing up his thoughts. The other boy, the one with dark hair and skin the color of paper who threw him to the ground and shattered his egg, muddled through his thoughts just as Nat's moaning started.

There was no rhythm or pattern to the utterance of Nat's pain, just that, pain. Wallace looked over his shoulder as Nat's eyes pinched shut tighter and his mouth parted, low cacophonous sounds filling the room in waves.

Wallace slid off the bed and rounded to the other side and grabbed the clear bag of liquid that was attached to a needle in Nat's arm. Faint white wording on the bag identified it as a kind of a compound between a rawst berry and chansey egg.

Wallace trailed a finger under the thin tube that led to Nat's arm, near the bottom of which was a round piece that twisted around the tube, synching it off. Turning the circular piece of plastic, Wallace watched the flow of the IV bag decrease and increase before he settled somewhere he thought was a grip that was looser than what the nurses had Nat on.

Looking away from the scarred planes of Nat's face, Wallace's eyes trailed down the bandages that covered his neck, chest, and upper arms, leaving just a foot from his hand up his arm exposed and unburned. Wallace grabbed his hand and squeezed gently.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," Wallace said. Nat's moans seem to fade as Wallace's bloated words filled the room. Wallace squeezed his hand again and noticed that despite how large it was, it was softer than his own. Days of picking strands of spinarak's web off his ceiling and the occasional session with Don practicing his throw had left his hands slightly rough and calloused.

"You'll get through this," Wallace said. "I know you can get –" Wallace's voice caught in his throat as Nat squeezed his hand back.

Looking towards the head of the bed, Nat was staring back at him with one wide eye, the other covered by gauze. "I'm sorry," Wallace said, his knees weak and his voice shaking now that he knew Nat was listening. "I'm sorry." Tears pricked at his eyes, but rather than wipe them away, Wallace cupped Nat's hand.

Nat's eye widened even more and his breathing grew intense. Wallace watched his lips twitch and the look in his eye change. Wallace gasped as Nat's grip tightened and the burned boy's mouth parted, words forming there before he actually spoke them.

"Three boys. They're coming," he said. "The little one, he wants you dead."

"Did they do this to you?" Wallace sucked in a deep breath as he pried his hands away from Nat and brought them to his chest. "Did, did they burn you?" Wallace looked over Nat's body again and studied every band of wrapped skin. Each inch of flesh had been scorched as a message to him.

"Get my family, get them out of here," Nat said. "They're coming."

* * *

"For the record, and I want you to know I don't put many things on record, but I'll put this on the record because this is a very bad idea," Izumi said in a harsh whisper so close to Wallace's ear he smelled the man's breath mint.

"I know," Wallace said, eyes focused across the small cafeteria in the Health and Wellness Center. After a curt phone call to Izumi, the forger had returned to campus and rounded up Eleanor, Simone, Ben, and the missing Freelily brother, Cosmo, and brought them to the Center.

Wallace watched a sobbing Cosmo bury himself into the arms of his mother while Don and his cousin Rosanna sat on either side of Don's father, each looking more stoic than the one beside them, their plates untouched. Nurse Joie sat with them and from his distance, Wallace could tell she was speaking to the table as a whole by her use of grandiose arm gestures and how often she shifted which side she faced.

Just a few tables behind them, Eleanor picked at her plate of food while Ben and Simone had cleared theirs and the latter was looking around like she wanted to make a pass for seconds.

"Well," Izumi said, exasperated and looking ragged in a white button-up and black jeans, "tell me the plan. If I'm going to die following you I'd at least like to know what the plan is."

"No one's going to die," Wallace said, his eyes flicking back to the Freelily table. When he left Nat he had fallen back asleep without saying any more, despite how many questions he asked about Chara, the boy on the stadium field, and who the third boy was.

"This feels like a suicide mission. I'm too young for this kind of risky behavior, I've got clients waiting for me in Lumiose," Izumi said as he eased down onto the bench with Wallace. "Alright, let me get his straight. So apparently there are two people working with Chara? And everyone that Chara, this man from the stadium, and the mysterious third man might want to target, you thought it was a good idea to gather them into one building? I'm starting to wonder whose side you're on."

"Remember those notes I was getting at my room?" Wallace asked as he looked beyond Izumi to where a janitor was making a lot of noise as he mopped the floor near their table. "If either of these two people working with Chara is the one doing it then somehow they have access to the dorms. So if they wanted to get Eleanor, Ben, or Simone they'd be sitting ducks in there with no one to warn them. Public safety is watching this building after Nurse Joie told them what happened to Nat so anyone going in or out is being searched and profiled."

"But you don't think that's going to be enough," Izumi said.

"Nope," Wallace said as the janitor moseyed in front of their table, mopping in broad circles. "I think Chara and whoever he's working with will stop at nothing to get me," Wallace said. "They'll get through somehow, if they aren't already inside. They'll find me, or Eleanor, or maybe Nat to keep him from saying anything else. That's how we catch them. You can't do much inside a place like this without attracting attention from the nurses and with security tightened anyone suspicious will bring the police running."

"That's the plan, to get them arrested?" Izumi asked. "Gosh, why hasn't anyone tried that before – oh wait! They have! Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is the third time Chara has been on campus and yet he's still loose. This is a suicide mission."

"I heard you the first time, but it's the best bet. Chara knows something about me, and I don't know how," Wallace said. "He called me Pearce."

Izumi's brows raised high the skin on his forehead folded into thick wrinkles. "What the hell? Just who is this guy?"

"I don't know, but between that, the letters, and a third mystery person out there I can't focus on it right now. Arlette is on her way to take Simone and Ben to the resident unit." Wallace asked as he focused on Eleanor who was staring out into the storm. "I need you to go to Nat's room and watch over him."

The janitor stalked back across the floor in front of their table, looking over his work before he dropped a wet floor sign down and walked off, his shoes squeaking the whole way. As he exited the cafeteria he swerved to avoid a run-in with Arlette who shuffled her way in, arms folded loosely across her chest.

"And you?" Izumi rubbed a hand across his mouth and pushed back a handful of his ink black hair as he stood from the bench. "Where will you be?"

"I need to talk to Eleanor, see if she can help me convince the Freelilys that Nat could be in danger," Wallace said. "The head nurse wants to believe I didn't burn Nat, and if I tell her what he said she should believe me and her word is enough to get Nat moved somewhere else. I think Don told me his family is from Sinnoh, that seems far enough away from Chara. So if we can get Nat out of here all we have to do is keep Simone, Ben, and Eleanor safe. If something bad happens I left elgyem in Nat's room, he'll be able to teleport you and Nat to safety. I found a chapel in the building, elgyem already knows to take Nat there if things go bad."

"For all of our asses I hope this works," Izumi said as he walked away from the table and weaved through the arrangement of long tables across the box of a room.

Wallace watched Izumi head directly for the exit before he turned and followed Arlette who was standing beside Simone and Ben. Wallace slowly stood as Arlette timidly led a nonchalant Simone and Ben, who shadowed behind her, from the cafeteria before he crossed the room to Eleanor's table, the sight of him causing her visible distress. "Hi," he said, his tone desperate as he eased into the spot beside her.

"Izumi, he's your dad?" Eleanor turned away, her face reflected in the window and her posture tense as she cupped her hands between her knees and rocked back and forth. "He told me Chara is back. He's in the building?"

"I think so, yeah," Wallace said, ignoring her first question as his eyes flicked down the line to the Freelily table, Nurse Joie was still talking.

"He's here for us?" she asked, her voice soft and on the verge of breaking.

Wallace swallowed hard and placed his hands on the table, leaning forward to look at the side of her face. "I know you might be mad at me still for blowing up at you, and I'm sorry, I really am, but right now I need you on my side and for you to trust me."

"Why did you have him bring me here?" Eleanor asked as she turned, their faces instantly too close. "If he's coming back for us, why are we together, why don't we tell the police?"

Wallace's eyes flicked from side to side as he studied the crystalline ponds of Eleanor's eyes, brimming with tears as she stared down at him. His words dried up on his tongue and when he didn't speak Eleanor pulled her glasses off and rubbed at her eyes.

"We shouldn't be together," she said, her voice weaker than before. "If he's here this is the last place we should be." Eleanor slid her glasses back on and wiped at her cheeks with the sleeve of her hoodie before she buried her hands back in her lap.

"I know," Wallace said, inhaling. "But this is best, to keep everyone safe and to get Chara arrested and out of our lives, we have to be here. We're going to talk to the head nurse in private, tell her all about Chara, and if what we say isn't enough Ben and Simone can talk to her too, and they should be able to protect Nat and find Chara and his friends if they enter the building."

"Friends?" Eleanor gasped.

Wallace bit his lip and nodded. "The nurse said Nat's burns look like someone attacked him and Nat told me about three boys. Last night I think I saw one of them, he attacked me, he was working with Chara. The third, I don't know. They're both on campus still, coming for me, or Nat, or anyone involved with that night at the safari. I don't know."

"The safari," Eleanor said, her whimpering starting again. She tipped her head back, the brunette waves of her hair falling across her shoulders as she fought back the falling tears. "Nothing has been the same since the stupid safari," she said, whining through gritted teeth.

Wallace's eyes fell from her face to the bandage on her cheek that concealed the knife gash Chara branded her with, a reminder she'd live with for the rest of her life. "I know," he said. "I started getting messages and notes on my door and I kept waiting for Chara to come back, I can't – "

"You too?" Eleanor asked, her head snapping down so fast her glasses slid down her nose.

"You too? You too, too?" Wallace asked, eyes wide. "You got notes?"

"Yeah," Eleanor breathed before she dug into the pockets of her hoodie and dropped her phone onto the table with a loud thunk. She swiped through the lock screen and launched her gallery and began furiously swiping through until she stopped on a photo of two white pieces of paper and slid the phone to him. "Look, there they are, but uh – please don't swipe left..."

Wallace sat on his hands and leaned over the phone, reading two messages inked across the papers.

 **WITH MY KNIFE  
** **ELEANOR ELEANO** **R  
** **I'LL GUT YOU  
** **DOWN TO YOUR CORE**

 **IT'S TRUE THAT MURDER  
** **MAY BE FROWNED UPON  
** **BUT ELEANOR YOU CAN'T DENY  
** **THAT IT'S JUST SO FUN**

Wallace read over the words several times before he let himself take in the sight of the words etched onto the pages, Chara's threat to kill her and the reminder of what her arcanine did. "Did you tell anyone about these?" Wallace asked as went to scoot her phone back, but his finger grazed the screen and the next picture in her gallery came across the screen.

Wallace heard Eleanor's gasp as a photo of her and Neo filled the screen, the two of them sitting before the campus's fountains, ear to ear smiles on their faces. His first reaction of embarrassment quickly faded under the surprisingly pleasant feeling he got seeing the two together.

"The notes." Eleanor coughed roughly as she snatched her phone off the table. "Some girls in my hall saw them, Serena Saint-Mars is my roommate, so of course she saw, but they all thought it was some prank," Eleanor said as she powered down the phone and slipped it away. "I was a little too embarrassed to bring it up after that, but they stopped coming after a while. I didn't really have anyone to talk to about the safari or anything, I mean those grief counseling meetings helped, but not much."

"I'm sorry," Wallace said, taking her words as a personal blow. "You could have talked to me, but I made it seem like you were as bad as Chara. I was so freaked out I don't think I could really understand what you did for me that day. You saved me life and yeah what your arcanine did was crazy and violent, but we both might not be here if it hadn't happened. Thank you."

Eleanor pushed her glasses back up and nodded before she glanced to Wallace and the smallest smile grew on her face. "You're welcome," she said, fighting a bigger smile.

"I know this sounds crazy and that this is the last place you want to be, but we have to stop him and I can't think of another way," Wallace said as he scooted out from the bench and stood. "Let's go to Nat's room."

Eleanor nodded and got up from the table and followed after Wallace who headed for the opening in the wall out of the cafeteria. Rounding the corner, Wallace glanced back to see the nurse still chatting with the Freelily family, this time to the father, but she still passed him a knowing glance before he was out of sight.

Navigating the halls of the Health and Wellness Center with purpose and a renewed sense of pride in his step, Wallace led Eleanor into the ICU. Before they turned at the nurse's station, Wallace eyed the room at the end of the hall, the red light for surgery was still on and Nurse Joie hadn't had any updates for him on his egg. He bit the inside of his cheek and forced himself to keep walking, prioritizing a visit to the surgery room behind security Nat and his family's safety.

Once they reached Nat's room, the number of which was seared into his brain, Wallace placed a hand on the door, anchoring himself to it and stood to the side. "She shouldn't be long," he said, eyeing the end of the hall.

Eleanor nodded as she paced slightly in front of the door. "I'm sweating," she said softly before she swiped at her forehead with the sleeve of her hoodie.

"It's fine, we're just going to talk to the nurse and then hopefully let the police sort this whole this out and we'll go wait with the others," Wallace said. "Where's Izu – my dad?"

Eleanor let out a high gasp as she pressed herself to the door to Nat's room, her face pressed to the glass. "I don't think anyone is inside!" she said.

Wallace threw himself at the door, practically body slamming Eleanor who flew out of the way and nearly stumbled to the floor. Peering into the corner of the room Wallace could just see the edge of the bed and noticed how flat the sheets looked and that Nat's bandaged legs weren't in the air.

Wallace twisted the knob and pushed against the door, stepping into the room he saw the bed was completely empty. All of the tubes and wires that had connected Nat to the equipment in the room were dangling from their machines, fluids dripping onto the floor.

"Elgy!" Wallace said as he rushed to the side of the bed. There he found elgyem laying in the ball on the floor, trembling. Carefully, Wallace scooped elgyem up in his arms. The pokémon let out a pained groan as the red light on his hands flashed rapidly, his arms crossed over his midsection. "What happened?" Wallace asked, his voice wet as he moved elgyem's arms to uncover a large bruised patch on his stomach.

"Wallace, there's blood," Eleanor said from the doorway.

Wallace sucked in a harsh breath before he glanced to Eleanor who was staring at the floor. Rounding the edge of the bed, Wallace's eyes dropped to the tile where he found a small crimson drop at Eleanor's feet that led into the hall.

Following the droplet, Wallace and Eleanor came upon another spot of blood in the middle of the hall. Wallace pulled elgyem closer to his chest, listening to the ragged breathing of his pokémon as he and Eleanor followed a growing trail of blood towards the end of the hall, to the double doors of the room Nat had first been treated in.

When they were just a few yards from the door a loud grunting and shuffle froze Wallace and Eleanor before the doors broke open and Izumi came rolling out across the floor.

The man flipped over before he slowed, his skin squeaking against the tile, as he stopped before Wallace and Eleanor. "We have a problem," Izumi groaned as he looked up towards the doors.

Wallace followed his line of sight as the doors opened again and the janitor from the cafeteria stepped through, his arms out as he held the doors open. Behind the janitor, garchomp, the same dragon-type Arlette had sent out against him, stomped up to the doors.

"Wallace!" Eleanor gasped as she came to his side and pointed over his shoulder.

Wallace struggled to tear his eyes away from the dragon-type to follow where Eleanor was pointing. Inside the emergency room, several feet behind the garchomp, was Nat's motionless body sprawled across the floor.

"What are you do, doing?" Wallace asked, his voice breaking. "That's our friend in there."

"I know who he is, Wallace," the janitor said.

Wallace's hands tightened around elgyem's body as he narrowed his eyes on the janitor. "How do you know my name?"

"I know just about everything there is to know about you," the janitor said as he pulled the cap off his head and a riotous mop of black hair was set free to fall to his shoulders. He rustled his hand through it before he stepped out of the doorway and exchanged stares with Wallace. "Hi, my name is Tom."

Wallace felt his blood run cold. The same pale face and ice blue eyes from the stadium were staring back at him. Wallace's eyes fell from the boy's face to a tiny scar under his lip. Tom, the name Chara called out and the same one that was attached to the dummy on the field.

"But now that the game is over, my real name is James Moore," he said. "The stadium dummy was Chara's idea, I was just along for the ride. You know, nothing but the warm feeling of blood over his knuckles seemed to excite Chara until you came along. That's why I agreed to the little stunt in the stadium. I was curious to find out what was holding up this assignment."

"It was you, you burned Nat," Wallace said, trembling as he felt himself backing away from James.

"No," James said. "I could have, but fire isn't my thing. I was in the cafeteria earlier, I heard you two about Chara and his two companions," James said as his intense ice blue gaze shifted from Wallace down to Izumi. "You can blame our other friend for Nat's burns if you want." James eyes drifted away from Izumi and his chest fell as he exhaled. "So Wallace, Chara's waiting for you, are you going to come along? Otherwise I might be tempted to put Nat out of his misery if you decide not to come with me. You've held us up long enough."

"Held you up?" Wallace asked.

"Who are you?" Eleanor asked. "What do you want with us?"

"Us? I don't want anything to do with you three in particular, Chara's taken an interest in you," James said as he lazy pointed to Wallace. "My interests lie elsewhere. My job didn't have me coming this far north, but Chara has been hanging around and slowing us down."

"Your job?" Wallace asked. "Who are you?"

"They call us the Orphans," James said as his eyes drifted to the ceiling and then back down. "Our jobs vary, as do our motives. You were a job, Wallace, but Chara's gotten hung up on you, so the rest of us joined in to speed up the process."

"The rest?" Izumi asked, his voice a whisper in the hall.

James smiled, wide and placid, as he held up four fingers. The corner of James's mouth then twitched into an odd smirk before he backed up in the emergency room. "I wish you could see what I'm seeing. In here, there's a young man, severely burned, who will probably never have a decent social life again, who could blame him if he just slipped away," James said as he made a fluttering gesture with his fingers, "and died in his sleep? Because in his room I saw a lot of cables and cords that looked pretty important. Who knows what will happen now that he's not connected to any of them. The possibilities are endless, don't – "

"Coward!" Wallace yelled as he took a bold step forward and charged at James.

James's head snapped towards Wallace before he ran forward as well, zipping past his garchomp and connecting with Wallace. Ducking low, James rammed his shoulder into Wallace's stomach, the blow knocking the wind out of Wallace and dazing him momentarily.

Wallace struggled to keep elgyem in his arms as he felt his feet leave the ground, James's arms snaking around his waist before he flipped him over his shoulder. A small yelp left Wallace's mouth before he came down hard on the tile, his bones rattling as he hit the floor.

Wallace heard Eleanor scream but was unable to do anything as James stepped over him, his hands snaking into the front of his shirt.

"My name is James, not coward," James said as he moved with slow precision to pin Wallace to the floor with his knees. "Nibbler," he said.

Wallace listened as a loud clicking sound filled the hall. Beyond James, Wallace watched the garchomp step out into the hall. Garchomp nosed its way into the center of the hall, approaching Izumi and Eleanor with slow steps, a low growl coming from its chest.

"Nibbler might not be as mean as me, but he won't fail to follow my command," James said before he rolled his neck around. "You," he said, aiming a thin finger at Izumi. "You've got five seconds."

Wallace watched Izumi's body tense as the garchomp approached him, towering over the average man. Izumi shuddered under the stare of the dragon-type, but his mouth twisted into a kind of grin as his hand fell to his waist. "Alright then."

James's head tipped to the side. "One, two, three – "

Izumi glanced between Eleanor and Wallace before he turned and sprinted back down the hall. Nibbler growled at his retreating back, seemingly displeased before it snapped at Eleanor.

"Four, five." James sighed and focused on Wallace as he placed his hand around the base of Wallace's neck and squeezed gently. "Too slow," he said as he squeezed tighter. "Nibbler, get him."

Wallace watched the garchomp tear its focus from Eleanor before it lunged forward and closed the gap between it and Izumi in one leap. The garchomp's feet touched Izumi's shoulders and brought the man down in an instant. Wallace jolted at the feeling of Izumi's body impacting the floor. A loud gasp filled the hall, as if all of the air in Izumi's lungs had exploded from his mouth. If the man yelled out, it was covered up by the snarl of the garchomp who hovered over him, nipping and scratching at him.

"Let him go!" Wallace yelled, but his throat closed up as James's hands pressed in tighter.

"What about you?" James asked as he craned his neck to Eleanor.

Wallace barely had Eleanor in focus before light erupted at her feet. He felt James's grip on his neck vanish as well as the boy's weight on his chest and took the moment to buck him off. He heard James hit the floor beside him before Wallace sat straight up and threw himself towards the emergency room. He flew inside and slid across the floor to Nat's side. To his relief there was no one else inside, just Nat on the floor. With elgyem cradled to his chest with one hand, Wallace fumbled around to find a pulse on Nat, but quickly gave up and laid a finger under the boy's nose. Relief flooded him when he went a short puff of hot breath hit his finger.

Wallace bowed his head, silently thanking the heavens that Nat was still alive before he looked back into the hall and saw a pokémon standing tall above James, its lower body composed of two long white legs and above its waist was green with red horns protruding from its chest and back. A set of dangerous looking blades seemed to be attached to its arms as it stared James down, but James didn't seem afraid as he rose to challenge it.

"A gallade won't save you. One word and Nibbler tears your friend's throat out," James said to Eleanor as he nodded down the hall.

Eleanor gasped before she whirled around. "Pearl, save Izumi!"

Wallace watched as Eleanor's gallade, Pearl, dashed off past its trainer down the hall, but James didn't take the moment to attack Eleanor, instead, he turned in toward the emergency room.

Wallace kicked his legs, frantically trying to kick the doors shut and also get to his feet, but before either of those could happen, James lunged forward grabbed him. Wallace yelped at the feeling of James's grip on his ankles as elgyem slipped from his arms.

"Elgyem!" Wallace cried as he was pulled across the floor. He grabbed onto the edge of the doorway as James pulled him into the hallway, elgyem's eyes opening just slightly

The lights on elgyem's hands continued to blink red as he uncoiled and looked around him. "Elgy..."

"Danger!" Wallace cried as his grip on the frame broke and he was pulled into the hall. "Teleport now!"

Wallace pulled his hands over his head as he heard James stomping around above him. Through his arms he watched James stumble into the room just as elgyem and Nat vanished with a glint of light.

James stared at the floor inside before he swore at the top of his lungs and kicked at the door. "Gone!" he barked. "Where did you send him?"

"Someplace safe," Wallace said before he glanced down the hall. Izumi was on the ground, not moving, but the garchomp wasn't on him anymore. Instead its fangs and claws were bared as it lunged at swiped at Eleanor's gallade who blocked against its swipes with the blades on its arms.

The space around Wallace quickly faded into the essentials, the most glaring of his problems being James. Through the corner of his eye Wallace saw James coming out of Nat's room. If Eleanor could handle James's garchomp, then all he had to do was get to elgyem and Nat.

Wallace clutched at the floor the best he could to pull himself forward as the soles of his shoes gained purchase on the tile and once he got his legs under him Wallace took off. Moving so fast each impact of his feet on the ground sending thrums of shocks of his thighs, Wallace blew between the battling pokémon and Eleanor who had pulled Izumi against the wall, and down to the nurse's station only to find it empty. He slammed his fists against the glass and cursed himself for stopping, if anyone had been inside they would have come running by then because of all the noise.

"Fire blast," James said.

Wallace watched the bland walls of the hallway light up orange before he threw a look over his shoulder. James's garchomp seemed to be containing a growing mass of flames in its mouth. Licks of fire spread from the garchomp's jaws before it jutted its neck out and the ball of fire shot forward.

Eleanor pulled Izumi to the ground, each of them flattening themselves on the floor as the ball spread into five elongated points, the heat of which consumed the hall and seemed to burn the air from Wallace's lungs as it honed in on him. Wallace made the futile effort of shielding himself Eleanor's gallade dashed in front of him, its arms together in front of its chest as it took the brunt of the fire blast.

Wallace recoiled as the gallade seemed to cleave through the fire using the blades on its arms, the power from the attack warming his arms.

Something glinting on the ceiling caught Wallace's attention as the flames and smoke from Nibbler's attack cleared before water burst from the ceiling. Wallace shielded his eyes as the sprinkler doused the hall, but strained to keep James in his sight through the pelting water.

"Pearl, close combat," Eleanor said from the floor.

Wallace's eyes flicked away from James to see Eleanor practically dragging Izumi down the hall before her gallade took off from him.

James brushed some of his hair out of his face as he stood tall. "Dragon claw."

The claws on James's garchomp shimmered green before it lunged forward to meet Pearl whose hands had closed into fists. Wallace flinched at every blow Pearl landed on Nibbler, each impact the gallade landed on the garchomp's neck and chest resonated through the hall as if someone were hammering through the walls.

"Nibbler! Smack it away!" James snapped.

Wallace watched the garchomp leap back, away from another of Pearl's blows, its claws skittering and scraping across the slick tile before it whirled around and its wide tail slammed into the approaching gallade.

Pearl out of an eerily human-like cry of pain as it stumbled toward the wall before Nibbler took the chance to attack. The garchomp leaped forward and scored its green claws down the front of Pearl's chest, two red gash marks flanking the red horn on gallade's chest.

"Pearl!" Eleanor gasped, her hands cupping her mouth. "If you're up to it, use swords dance."

Eleanor laid Izumi down and Wallace trembled at the sight of the man's forearms. Where garchomp had attacked him large red grooves were etched into his skin, blood leaking out through the sleeves of his shirt and several puncture wounds were bleeding from Izumi's shoulders.

Eleanor's gallade stumbled back, his long legs tangling before he fell against the wall. "Ga!" The gallade let out another low cry as he slowly regained his composure. Pearl then flicked his arms out to the side, the blades of which began to shimmer and glint.

"Nibbler, swords dance and then dragon claw," James said.

"Garr!" James's garchomp roared to the ceiling as it held its arms out, its claws lengthening through the duration of its outcry.

Without hesitation, Nibbler exploded down the hall, stretching its arms out, leading with its claws and aiming for gallade's face, as if the points of its claws was what Nibbler wanted its opponent to see last. Gallade seemed to ready himself before he brought one of his blades up in a wide arc.

Wallace watched a slight change in the positioning of the garchomp, the arch of its body shifted, and suddenly its claw wasn't aimed for gallade's face, instead it dug down the center of gallade's chest before the two pokémon collided. Their impact was like doors slamming before gallade began to stumble back, his other arm coming up and then down, but Nibbler unfurled from Pearl and spun around.

The garchomp's tail whooshed through the air and smacked into gallade's side. The thunk of the impact echoing in the hall and gallade jerked to the side, his legs clambering to keep him upright.

Eleanor cried out for her pokémon, but Wallace's eyes shot to the garchomp who seemed to be struggling to stay upright as well. Off-balance and reeling from the impact, Nibbler attempted to get its feet under it, but with every step its feet seemed to slip on the slick tiles. Wobbling, garchomp fell over, its front claws digging into the tile to prevent it from collapsing on the floor.

"The sprinklers, they aren't good for garchomp," Izumi said, her voice barely audible under the patter of water from the ceiling. "The water is hurting it," he said, sounding a little sad for the dragon-type as he reached for his waistline and pulled up a Poké Ball.

James's lip curled up as if he'd caught a whiff of something rotten. "Nibbler!"

The garchomp let out a low growl as it forced itself up. On two feet again and looming over the others in the wall, Nibbler bared its fangs, showcasing teeth that looked capable of rendering flesh from bone.

"Fae, help Pearl," Izumi said.

Wallace watched the ball roll off Izumi's hand before it broke open on the ground and from it a clefable emerged from a curtain of light. The water from the sprinkler splashed against the protrusions of the fairy-type's body, but clefable didn't seem to mind the water as it positioned itself in front of Pearl.

"Stupid fairies," James muttered as he pulled a ball out and aimed it at Nibbler's back.

"Moonblast!" Izumi said, his voice raising until it cracked.

Izumi's clefable brought its hands together before it slowly spread them, a spiraling glittering ball of pure light forming in front of its chest.

Wallace narrowed his eyes as James fired a beam from Nibbler's ball to recall it, but Fae's attack struck it first. Leaving a glimmering path of light behind it, the moonblast struck the garchomp in the center of its chest, shattering upon contact and exploding into flecks of light and sparkles. Garchomp's wounded cry filled the hall, its face twisted and scrunched in pain before a red light covered it and its body seemed to freeze before it vanished.

"Dammit," James barked before he hurled another ball at the ground.

A green pokémon with menacing looking blades appeared from it, its wings vibrating every few seconds. "Scyther!" it cried.

"Your elgyem didn't last one second against my scyther, Wallace," James said. "Slash!"

James's scyther zipped down the hall, bypassing gallade and clefable, and instead went for Eleanor. It swung one of its arm overhead, the blade cutting through the air and leaving a groove in the wall. The girl dropped back to the ground and shrieked before she made an attempt to crawl away.

"Wallace."

The way James said his name, he wasn't shouting, but his voice filled the hall and bounced along the tiles to rattle him. When he looked back James was inching along the wall as the pokémon refocused their efforts onto the scyther.

"Run Wallace!" Izumi said.

Tearing his eyes from the James, Wallace turned and darted down the hall towards the lobby. He listened to the sound of footsteps in the water behind him until he reached the sliding doors and slipped through, immediately slowing down once he was in the lobby.

An alarm, for the sprinklers in the ICU he guessed, was ringing in the lobby and had every glancing nervously in his direction. Officers standing guard in the doorway were chatting amongst themselves, but none seemed urgent about checking out the alarm. Wallace padded across the room with quick steps as he headed for one of the randomly attached halls. He kept tossing looks over his shoulder until he passed through another set of sliding doors and immediately bumped into someone who grabbed his arms to steady him, Don. "What are you doing here?" Wallace asked as he pulled Don along down the hall.

"You! I mean – " Don said, but quickly cut-off mid-sentence as he struggled to keep up. "I mean, Nat, he just appeared in the chapel with your elgyem. Why? What's happening? Why are alarms going off?"

"Why were you in the chapel?"

"My mom told me to find it, she wanted to pray for Nat's recovery," Don said. "Why do you look so startled?"

"We can't stay here, he's coming for me, for Nat," Wallace said. "We need to get back to the chapel."

"What? Who?"

Wallace tugged on Don's elbow as he led him further down the hall. "I'll tell you once we're safe."

Don didn't need any more urging. He and Wallace took off, their hands linked as they jogged down the hall. Unlike the other units that Wallace was used to, the one he'd chosen at random had many halls that twisted and turned, filled with security buffers to confuse and trap them, but every turn they came to Wallace pulled Don down it with him.

"The chapel is this way," Don said as he took the lead at pulling Wallace along.

A fleeting glance of his shoulder showed Wallace James wasn't in sight and as he turned back he and Don burst through an out of place set of wooden doors and into a small room filled with pews, four on each side, and a statue of a marble white figure at the front of the room.

Wallace pulled free from Don's grip as he stepped further into the room. Along the front of the chapel flowers and stands were in place that cluttered his view of the front, but along the clutter, Wallace saw a girl sitting on the short flight of steps below the marble statue. Don's cousin, Rosanna, was there with Nat who rested ceremoniously against the steps, his head in Rosanna's lap.

"Elgyem?" Wallace asked as he approached the front of the room, wary of getting too close to the family.

"Elgy?" Elgyem appeared behind the statue and weakly floated down to eye level and buried himself into Wallace's neck.

"Good job, you did good," Wallace said as he rubbed elgyem's back. "Thank you so much. Are you okay?"

Elgyem flashed the yellow lights on its hands against Wallace's cheeks before he clambered up to his shoulder. "Elgy!"

"Nat," Don said as he took a seat beside his cousin and took his older brother's hand. "What's he doing in here? Where are his machines? What's happening?"

"His, his breathing, it isn't right," Rosanna said, her cheek slick with tears and her eyes puffy. Behind Rosanna, her green and yellow bug-type skittered along, inching along the curve of her shoulder.

Wallace looked back to the chapel doors, they had gone still after they'd bust through and he hoped if James found the room he'd pass it without a second thought. "You need to know what happened to Nat."

"What do you mean what happened to Nat?" Don asked, the lines in his face deepening in worry.

Wallace bit at the inside of his cheek as he checked the chapel doors again. As he looked back the wooden doors burst open, Eleanor staggering through them with Izumi hanging against her. They only made it a few feet before Eleanor cried out and the two of them fell to the ground.

"Ellie!" Wallace said as he turned back to help her.

"Fine!" Eleanor rasped. "I'm fine, just tired. James wasn't behind us, he ran off."

"Wallace, what happened to Nat?" Rosanna asked.

"He wasn't burned on accident when he was trying to get students out of the stadium or trying to put the fire out," Wallace said as she turned back to the group of cousins. "The head nurse said someone attacked Nat and lit him on fire. Don, I think it was the boy chasing us or someone he knows."

Don's shoulders sagged and his mouth fell open, his trimmed brows knitting together. "What?

"Wh – How?"

"Why would?"

"No, no, no, that's not possible!"

"Why would anyone... why?"

"It doesn't matter," Wallace said, using his hands to signal down the outcries from Don and Rosanna. "The police are everywhere if we can just alert one of them everything will be okay. Elgyem will able to get you all out of here," Wallace said as he rubbed elgyem's leg who had taken his spot on his shoulder again. "Gather together, he should be able to take us all at –"

"Psyshock."

A bright purple light broke through the gaps in the chapel doors before the wood was blown off its frame and several purple and blue lights shot into the room. Wallace heard Rosanna scream before she dove for the ground. He ducked behind one of the pews but watched as the projectiles seemed to swerve off course and crash around the room. Many of them crashed into the pews but didn't stop. They continued plowing forward, crashing through the room and tearing through the floor and walls on the left side of the room before they came to a stop at the front and exploded with light and energy.

Wallace's last thought before the explosion was to protect Don. Pushing forward, threw himself at Don, knocking the boy over and pressing him into the floor as the room exploded with light and debris. The room dripped with the sound of wood splintering and glass shattering while the scent of singed fabric grew heavy in the air.

The seconds dripped away, but Wallace didn't dare move. As the chaos in the died away he focused his senses feel the slight movement that indicated Don's breathing under him. Moving his head as if he were pinned, Wallace squinted through the hazy chapel to see Nat still on the steps, a gash on his forehead bleeding through the gauze, but Rosanna was shielding him. Down the aisle, Eleanor and Izumi had taken shelter between two pews that had nearly been destroyed, their remains piled over them like a makeshift tent.

A soft ticking sound came from somewhere in the room and when he craned his head back to the door, Wallace felt his heart skip a beat. Standing in the ruins of the door frame was James and beside him, Chara.

* * *

End of Chapter Nineteen

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ A new villain has joined the battlefield! **James Moore** by **The Pocketwatch Ripper.**

I forgot the question for the previous chapter!

 **Question of the Chapter #17 & #18: **Do you think Wallace will be able to keep everyone safe from character, or will be there another casualty? Do you think Wallace's egg will survive?


	20. Gone

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter** **Twenty** **– Gone**

 _Hell is oneself, hell is alone  
_ _the other figures in it merely projections. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace turned away as a gleam from the hall filled the chapel. Seconds passed with every one of Wallace's tortured breaths before he floundered to his feet. Sounds dripped from around the room and as Wallace peered down the aisle he spotted Eleanor and Izumi cowering under the wreckage, seemingly unaware of the danger looming in the entry.

As Wallace got to his feet, gripping the jagged edge of a ruined pew for support, he listened to what sounded like shards of stone shifting on the steps behind him. Wallace spared a glance over his shoulder and saw Rosanna shaking bits of plaster and stone loose her shoulders from as she sat up over Nat.

The crunch of glass called Wallace's attention back to the front of the chapel as Chara and James took a step inside. Wallace bit his lip as his stomach bottomed out, his hands spasming. If not for the pew, his knees might have given out under him. For a moment, staring down the madman, Wallace realized all of his plans for trapping Chara had not only failed but backfired completely as nearly everyone he wanted to protect from Chara had ended up cornered by him.

Wallace paled seeing a CHara's mouth grow into a wide smile as if Wallace's realization of his failure was visible on his face. Still clinging the pew for support, Wallace bent back down, somewhat hiding behind the debris, as he inspected the jumbled ground for any kind of weapon.

"Wallace!"

Wallace felt his heart seize and his hand closed around what felt like a piece of the statue as a voice startled him. Clutching the fragment, Wallace whirled around and raised his hand to find Don there.

Don's eyes widened seeing the makeshift weapon in Wallace's grip. "Sorry. It's me, it's just me," Don said, his eyes focused on Wallace's hand as he eased back onto the ground and raised his hands up in defense. "It's just me."

"Sorry," Wallace breathed as he made a fidgety and unstable trembling with his head. Wallace scooted closer to the pew and tightened his grip on the statue fragment. Steadying his breathing, Wallace rose up and whipped the fragment across the room. Hoping Don's teaching about throwing Poké Ball had paid off, Wallace watched piece sail over the chapel, but curved at the last minute and shattered against the wall, several feet away from Chara's head, the intended target.

Wallace felt his cheeks burn as Chara's face split into a wide smile before he laughed. "It's like he wants to die," Chara said. Chara clenched his stomach as he doubled over in exaggerated laughter, his eyes focused on something beyond Wallace's head on the austral chapel wall.

Wallace gave the red carpeting another quick once over before he grabbed anything he could fit his hands around. Plates, wood planks, stone shards, and glass; Wallace chucked it all across the room as he made a pattern out of scampering down the back of the pew and lobbing objects overhead as he inched toward the aisle.

Peering down the side of the pew, Wallace saw that James and Chara had made progress down the aisle, climbing over the wreckage they created. Wallace glanced toward the chaff pile and saw the ashen faces of Izumi and Eleanor. The pair had taken the hint and nearly vanished inside their lean-to of debris as James and Chara passed them. Wallace clenched his jaw as Chara passed them, hoping he wouldn't notice, but his hope faded as Izumi crawled out onto the floor and popped up behind them.

"No!" Wallace yelled as he lunged out into the aisle.

Izumi's hand was nearly to his waistline, the glint of a Poké Ball visible from the distance before James whirled around on him. In the process, James snatched up a long plank of wood and held it over his shoulder.

The range was in James's favor and his aim was perfect as the board connected squarely with Izumi's chest and shattered on impact. Wallace flinched at the sound of the wood splintering and breaking up into pieces. The look on Izumi's face turned from sheer determination to shock as he stumbled back and then dropped to the floor.

In the middle of the aisle, with the moment of surprise on his side while James and Chara's backs to him, he darted forward. Wallace moved as silent as possible, but his foot slamming down onto a plank of wood gave him away as the wood snapped under his weight. The snap signaled his arrival and James and Chara turned their attention toward him. Wallace faltered as Chara's grin grew as his eyes focused on him and James whirled a Poké Ball in his direction.

Wallace flinched as the ball struck the ground several yards in front of him. From it came a flare of light From it, his garchomp emerged, looking ragged, but less damp than it had under the sprinklers. Garchomp slammed into the middle of the aisle, its tail swishing from side to side and swiping away debris and smacking the remains of the pews.

"Nibbler, shred him," James said, his eyes growing wide and his mouth twisting into a menacing grin.

Garchomp angled its torso down toward Wallace as its deadly jaws spread and it roared in compliance with James's command. Wallace watched garchomp's claws turnover, the points aiming at Wallace. The grating sound of garchomp's cry raised the hairs on Wallace's arms, but he didn't falter. Instead, Wallace lowered to the ground and wildly groped around him for any kind of weapon, eventually grabbing a slab of wood that he swung over his shoulder, only for it to shatter into strips against garchomp's head.

Dropping the rest of the wood, Wallace had just enough time to back up and run before garchomp charged at him. Just barely out of range, Wallace heard the dragon-type's claws carving through the air before he caught a flash of light behind one of the pews before a small pokémon jumped up onto the pew. Bipedal and blue with white bands around its midsection, the pokémon leaped across several pews and a pile of debris before it jumped for the garchomp. Wallace watched over his shoulder as the pokémon's hands, two black digits with one orange digit in the middle, struck the garchomp in the side of its head.

Garchomp growled as it buckled under the strike and backed down the aisle. Wallace paused as the new pokémon landed in the aisle between him and garchomp.

"Wallace, my croagunk will take on the garchomp," Don said from his hiding place behind the pew. "Solanine, nice sucker punch!"

Wallace looked down at the croagunk as it turned its torso around to Don and held its hand up, its wide mouth spreading into a smug smile. "Gunk!" it croaked.

Garchomp lowered itself to roar at the croagunk before it raised its claws to the air before its tailed thumped at the ground. Garchomp's tail thrashed against the ground before it stomped up to the croagunk, seeming to size it up. "Garr."

"Dragon claw," James said.

"Sucker punch again," Don said.

Garchomp and croagunk came to life at the same time, lunging at each other. The dragon-type pulled an arm back and jabbed down at the croagunk. Don's croagunk swerved to the side, its cheeks bulging before it lunged forward and landed another blow, that time up towards garchomp's gut. Unlike the first blow, garchomp didn't seem as affected, instead, it spun around and whacked croagunk across the head with its tail.

"Croooa!" Croagunk choked out as it teetered around holding its head.

"Nibbler, send it flying," James said, cooly.

Garchomp roared before it whirled around and smacked croagunk with its tail again. Croagunk groaned out as the tail struck it and went skidding back across the floor. Croagunk dug its hands into the floor, slowing itself down in time for garchomp to bear down on it. Before croagunk could fully ready itself, garchomp jumped and swung its tail down on croagunk again.

Wallace winced as garchomp's tail came down, the sound like someone swung a bat through the air. Croagunk raised its arms above its head and crossed them as garchomp's tail came down. Croagunk nearly buckled under the weight of garchomp's tail, but instead, the poison-type bent its knees and held its ground.

"Solanine, hang in there," Don said. "Bulk up!"

"Croa!" Croagunk let out a loud bellow and Wallace watched a red aura coat its body before steam seemed to waft off croagunk's body. The muscles of croagunk's arms bulged and became more defined before it pushed back against garchomp's tail, flicking its arms up and shoving the tail off.

Seemingly stunned, garchomp staggered back from croagunk who jumped behind the dragon-type and landed a blow in the middle of the garchomp's back.

Garchomp cried out as it stumbled forward and fell hard before it rolled over to land and stopped before its trainer.

"Nibbler, charge it," James said.

Garchomp nodded before it dashed from left and right, leaving behind afterimages as it crossed the ruined aisle of the chapel.

"Go for it, Solanine," Don said.

Croagunk threw its arms behind it as it ran forward, zigzagging across the floor, mimicking garchomp's movements. As the two pokémon neared each other, James yelled out a command, and garchomp pushed forward, faster. Garchomp's claws came out front, posed to strike, as it propelled itself at croagunk. Croagunk slid to a stop and crossed its arms, deflecting garchomp's blow before it began a series of strikes against the dragon-type.

Wallace moved to the back of the chapel and took his spot beside Don again and watched as garchomp towered over Don's croagunk, its deadly claws striking down at the smaller pokémon with tireless precision.

"Solanine, keep at it, let's make your poison touch count!" Don said, practically leaping into the air as he cheered on his pokémon.

Wallace watched a slight change in croagunk's posture as it laid back into garchomp with several blows, its hands glinting purple as it struck the dragon-type. On contact, the garchomp went rigid, its body straightening up as croagunk pulled back, but kept its hands raised.

Wallace narrowed his eyes, unsure if croagunk had succeeded in poisoning garchomp until a sound behind him caught his attention. Spinning on the balls of his feet, Wallace whirled to find Chara crouched over Nat with Rosanna and a knife in his grasp.

"No!" he gasped, his eyes drifting from the knife at Rosanna's throat to the side of Chara's face, bloated and dotted with angry looking bumps where spinarak's poison sting had struck him. "Let her go."

"Rose!" Don cried as he darted down the back row of pews and toward the aisle.

"Stay back," Wallace said as he held an arm out to stop Don.

"That's right, stay back," Chara said in a venomous tone as he sneered at Don. "I wouldn't want to spill any unnecessary blood," he said as he twisted the knife in his hand, the cutting edge grazing Rosanna's cheek. "Or would I?"

Rosanna let out a soft whine as her eyes pinched shut, the jagged knife-edge scraping near her cheekbone.

Behind Chara, Nat's body rose as if tugged upright by a thread before the burned boy buried his head into the curve of Chara's neck. Wallace's mouth fell open at the flash of Nat's teeth as his jaws clamped down on Chara's shoulder.

Chara yelled, though Wallace didn't think it was out of pain, but rather shock. Chara's arms snapped away from Rosanna, who fell forward and scrambled down the steps into her cousin's arms. Wallace watched as Chara clawed at Nat, tearing away strips of the gauze that covered his head.

"Solanine, use poison jab," Don said.

From the corner of his eye, Wallace saw James dashing down the aisle, leaping over the debris to reach Chara, but Don's croagunk crossed the aisle before he reached the steps.

Croagunk cocked its arm back before it propelled itself at James. The sound of shells breaking filled the chapel when the two connected. Wallace craned his neck back to find James sagging over after the blow, his hands clutching at his chest where croagunk connected before he fell to his knees.

As Wallace inched closer to the aisle he saw James hunched over and clutching his chest. His upper body drooped toward the ground in a comical manner as if it were an act to feign severe injury. Occasionally, Wallace heard him attempt to make a sound, but his words only came out as wheezy puffs of air as his lips mashed together soundlessly. From his face, Wallace focused on James's chest and back that seemed to inflate and deflate so quickly it looked unreal.

Shifting around to the front of James, where the boy pulled at his shirt, Wallace could see discolored skin on his chest. "Don, what's happening to him?" Wallace asked, his eyes trained on the patch of skin on James's chest where croagunk had struck him.

James's head snapped up, his eyes fraught and mouth scowling, but it wasn't his expression that startled Wallace, it was his color. James's wan cheeks had taken on a reddish-purple tinge. With the tight pinched look on his face and the slow discoloration on his chest spreading, it seemed like the same thread that had lifted Nat from the ground was steadily lynching James.

Wallace fell back on his feet as he watched James slip forward, one hand falling from his chest to support himself before he bent at the elbow and buckled onto his side. James rolled to his back and kept grasping at his torso while his chest heaved with uneven breaths, his face darkening.

"No!"

Whipping around, Wallace saw Don and Rosanna holding each other as Chara backhanded Nat. The burned boy went limp on the steps, half of his scorched head exposed as he fell. Chara lumbered above him, staggering, as he swiped at trickles of blood racing down his neck.

Wallace watched Chara's eyes glaze over Don and Rosanna before he locked onto Wallace and James's fallen form behind him. With one hand pinched at his neck, Chara reached to his waist and flicked a Poké Ball free.

Wallace shielded his eyes as the ball jounced down to the floor before it opened and the sound of hooves on the carpet filled the room. From his pocket, Wallace pulled out spinarak's ball and chucked it at the ground.

When the lights faded a familiar pokémon stood at the base of the steps, a skiddo, its leafy mane and tufts of brown fur thick and unkempt. Spinarak skittered around Wallace before another bug-type joined its side. The green and yellow pokémon with a chewed leaf behind its head that stayed on Rosanna's shoulder inched its way across the floor to stand beside spinarak.

Chara made another swipe at his neck before he came down the steps, eyeing the two bug-types and his skiddo. "A spinarak and a sewaddle, that's it?"

"Donny, help us," Rosanna said as she turned to her cousin.

Don nodded as he lifted his shirt and eyed a collection of Poké Balls on his waist, his hand hovering over the line before he grabbed one. "Venipede can do this." Don nodded as he pulled the ball from his waist. Rolling across the floor, the Poké Ball opened and released a small red pokémon that inched along the floor. A large hump sat behind its small head and led to a ribbed green abdomen and two feelers that twitched wildly.

"Smash them, Skiddo," Chara said.

Skiddo pranced around for a moment before it stomped its hooves against the floor and then charged forward, head low as it rammed the unsuspecting sewaddle, trampling it under its tackle.

"Tailor!" Rosanna cried. "Latch on with string shot."

"Sew!"

Wallace listened to the sewaddle's meek cry from under skiddo as the mount pokémon trounced away. Attached to the skiddo's belly was a thick white strand that looked like a wire that connected to the mouth of Rosanna's sewaddle, dragging across the floor.

"Spinarak, attach another line to it," Wallace said, an idea forming. "Use string shot on its leg."

Spinarak jumped forward and aimed his head at skiddo. "Spi, spi!" Spinarak jutted his neck out and shot a line like sewaddle's at the skiddo, his sticking to one of the skiddo's front legs.

As skiddo took a step its free leg snagged on the string line and it stumbled forward, its legs buckling as it lost its balance. "Dammit skiddo," Chara barked. "Vine whip!"

"Spinarak, stay back," Wallace said.

Spinarak bobbed his head and released his string before he leaped back just as skiddo's vine whacked the ground in front of him. Another slender whip sprouted from skiddo's back and cracked in the air before it shot down at spinarak who easily dodged it.

"Atropine, use poison tail," Don said as he tapped his venipede on its hump.

Venipede seemed energized at Don's touch and hopped up before it coiled itself into a ball and rolled toward skiddo, unfurling in time to flip over and have its split tail whack against skiddo's haunches.

"Ski!" Skiddo cried out as it struggled to untangle its legs from spinarak's string.

"Tailor, go up," Rosanna said as she rose to her feet and pointed her hands to the ceiling.

Wallace watched as the sewaddle released its string from skiddo and aimed for the ceiling. The high vaulted space above the chapel was nothing like the flat ceiling in the rest of the Health and Wellness Center. Wide wooden beams and arches supported the roof and crossed overhead, creating an intrigue and antique looking ceiling. Wallace watched a single strand of webbing connect to a beam and Rosanna's sewaddle swiftly climb it.

"Wallace, let's team up," Don said as his venipede rolled back to him.

Wallace gently scratched at spinarak's back as he urged his pokémon forward. "Spinarak, time a poison sting up with venipede."

"Go for a poison tail again," Don said as he pushed his venipede, still rolled up, back toward skiddo.

Venipede picked up speed as it tumbled toward its target, unfurling as it approached skiddo who seemed barely aware of the attack. Once venipede had struck skiddo again, the dual type bug tightened back into a ball as skiddo whipped around and lashed at it, its vine whacking harmlessly on venipede's outershell.

"There," Wallace said as he lowered himself to the ground and pointed to a patch of fur on skiddo's backside where venipede had struck it, the fur matted and its white flesh beneath visible. "Poison sting there."

Spinarak scooted forward before he fired a string at skiddo's leg that he climbed before he spread his mandibles and fired a spray of needle-like projectiles at skiddo's wound. When the first needle hit, skiddo let out a high bleat as it tried to buck off spinarak's string, its vine whips lashing around wildly.

"Hang on spinarak!" Wallace said. "Use infestation on it."

Slowly, spinarak vanished under the brown tufts of skiddo's fur and the mount pokémon stopped moving as it reared back and began to bite its backside.

"Let's get in a venoshock while it's distracted," Don said as he grabbed venipede. "Rosie, are you ready?" he asked.

"Yup, Tailor get ready to come down for a bug bite!" Rosanna said as she cupped her mouth towards the ceiling.

Wallace watched as Don held venipede in the palm of his hand like a ball before he hurled it into the air. The bug-type didn't go too high, but it arched above the skiddo and high enough for Rosanna's sewaddle to jump from the rafter and land on its back. "Spinarak, get out of there and use string shot, aim for the face," he said as he watched the pokémon come spinning down.

Spinarak leaped out from the mass of leaves on skiddo's back and made quick work of scurrying up its back to pause on its head. Spinarak sprayed a glob of string at the top of skiddo's head before he made a trip around the grass-type's face, wrapping his thread over its horns and eyes before disconnecting and inching away.

Just a few feet above skiddo, venipede uncoiled and its mouth opened, a viscid purple liquid frothing from its face before it struck skiddo's back. The liquid took no time at all to coat skiddo, staining the leaves on its back and soaking its fur. Sewaddle landed near skiddo's head and latched on with its small teeth to skiddo's face as it chomped away.

"Skiddo!" Chara yelled, the bass of his voice filling the chapel.

A red beam struck skiddo's side as Chara recalled it, dropping venipede and sewaddle onto the ground. The three trainers turned their attention to Chara who stood over Nat again, his knife in hand.

"Tailor, string shot it out of his hand," Rosanna said, waving her hand toward Chara.

The sewaddle jumped forward and rolled into a ball before it sprayed a thick line of string at Chara's weapon. Wallace squeezed his hands together as the string connected to the tip of the blade and sewaddle yanked back, using all of its might to pull, nearly tugging the knife from Chara until Chara grabbed the string and with a good yank pulled sewaddle off the ground.

"Tailor!" Rosanna shrieked as sewaddle soared through the air toward Chara who angled his knife to stab.

In his mind, Wallace saw Chara cut the sewaddle in half. "Elgyem!" he cried.

Though elgyem didn't appear, a glint of purple light shone off Chara's blade and seemed to stop the boy from moving the weapon as sewaddle dangled by the string in Chara's fist. Wallace watched the purple light halo the edge of the knife and an unseen force ripped it out of Chara's hand before the blade and sewaddle vanished from sight.

In the time it took Wallace to blink, elgyem was by his side with the knife and sewaddle. Chara stared at his hands, mouth agape as if the series of events were beyond his comprehension.

"Tailor!" Rosanna said as she raced across the chapel and fell down beside Wallace, scooping her bug-type up into her arms. "I'm sorry, that was too risky, wasn't it?"

Sewaddle nuzzled against Rosanna's cheek happily, seemingly unaffected by its near-death encounter. "Waddle!" it replied, cooly.

"I told you, Wallace, there are always weapons," Chara said as he stepped over Nat and crouched, his hands fitting around the base of Nat's neck.

Wallace gritted his teeth as he wrapped one arm around elgyem and charged for the steps. Behind him, he heard Rosanna and Don doing the same, all of their footfalls echoing on the chapel floors as they raced for Nat's life.

Rosanna hit the steps first and threw herself over Nat just as Don bounded up beside Wallace and rammed into Chara. The blow knocked Chara off Nat and onto his back, and then he and Don rolled and struggled on the platform above the steps as Wallace stepped over Nat.

"Elgyem, teleport us all," Wallace said as he grabbed Rosanna's shoulder and touched Nat's leg with his own before he stretched out to reach Don. Wallace leaned forward to reach him, but his fingers just barely missed Don as the light of elgyem's teleport filled his eyes.

Wallace cried out for Don as his finger barely grazed Don's foot when the bright ruin of the chapel swept away into the psychic folds of elgyem's teleportation. The warmth of the chapel turned into a sterile cold as he and Rosanna landed on a tile floor in a room with little lighting.

"Don!" Rosanna yelled, her voice bouncing off the walls. "He's not here. Wallace, I think he's still with that man!"

Wallace scanned the room, besides Rosanna, their pokémon, Nat, and machines, the room was empty. Wallace fell onto his hands and knees and slapped the ground, emitting a gruff noise from his gut. "We have to go back," he said as he wiped at his eyes and slowly got to his feet, rising up between two metal observation tables.

Every thought to save Don and retrieve Eleanor and Izumi from the chapel washed away as Wallace stared down at a small blue pokémon laying curled up inside a sturdy looking plastic box. A collection of tubes so thick if he gathered them his hands might not fit around them connected the pokémon to machines along the far wall.

"Totodile," Wallace said softly to the baby pokémon inside the box. The only bit of information the nurses could share with him about his egg after he arrived at the Center was the species of the baby, a totodile. Wallace knew little about them, but an encyclopedia claimed them to be extremely playful with a love to bite anything in sight.

Totodile's scales that should have been bright and blue were pallid and fragile looking on Wallace's baby and through its parted mouth he could see barely formed teeth. Wallace pressed his hands to the box, wishing he could somehow reach inside to comfort his totodile who seemed stable, evidenced by the constant beeping of a monitor across the room.

"Did they do this?" Rosanna asked.

Wallace wiped at his eyes and turned around. Behind him was the other observation table, though its occupant was much larger and possibly needed another table to itself. Wallace recalled it clearly, when Nurse Joie brought Nat in, along with him she brought an aggron in. It had to be Nat's, Wallace thought as he looked over its unmoving body, the silver plates of its armor scuffed and blackened. "It belongs to Nat, right?" he asked.

Rosanna nodded, her chin quivering as she pursed her lips as though fighting to hold back tears. "None of us have had traditional starters, Nat got Paladin when it was just an aron," she said before her chest fell and she let out a quick sob. "Paladin and Nat used to torment Donny and Cosmo." Rosanna bit her lip as she tilted her head and ran a hand down aggron's back.

Wallace watched her caress the pokémon as he rounded the table and came to her side, getting a look at what had her so emotional. The flames that had burned Nat had melted away sheets of the aggron's armor, reducing the silver plates on its body to nothing and even scorching through its black body to expose raw pink flesh beneath.

"There aren't any machines over here," Rosanna said quietly. "It's gone."

Wallace forced himself to look away from the damage done to aggron to notice there were no tubes or wires on aggron's body and no machines surrounding it. "No," Wallace said as he made another trip around the table, searching high and low for any kind of machine or advanced mechanism that could save the aggron's life, but found none.

"No, no, no, no, no!" Wallace said as he nearly bumped into Rosanna, his vision blurred by tears. He placed his hands flat on aggron's flesh, mindful of the burned patch that was as wide as his own chest. The body was cold and seemed to have settled into the table as if the burden weighing on it had succeeded and pressed it into its death bed.

"No, it can't be dead. Nat is still fighting, it can't –" Wallace broke off as he walked from the table, only to turn back and pace along the edge. "Nat is still fighting, why could they save him, but not – no, no!" Wallace stumbled as he rounded the table and crouched down beside Nat who had faded out into unconsciousness again.

Without regard for Nat's injuries, Wallace snaked his hands under him and lifted him. Not prepared for the weight, Wallace staggered back and slammed into totodile's table, but stayed upright and moved forward slowly until Nat was on the edge of aggron's table. "They should be together," he said, monotone as he tried to push Nat further onto the table, closer to aggron, but Nat's limbs kept slipping off.

"Wallace, stop, he's gone," Rosanna said as she palmed tears from her cheeks. "It doesn't, it doesn't matter anymore."

Wallace jerked back and slammed his hands onto aggron's table. "It does!" he shrieked before he kept trying to fold Nat's legs and arms up so he stayed on the table. "It matters, they have to be together," Wallace said, starting to repeat the phrase in varying volumes. "They have to be together, they can't – no, they have to be together, they have to be!" Wallace backed away slowly from the table, like a madman admiring his creation, Nat's bandaged and burned limbs oddly crooked around aggron's corpse. "Andrew has to have his team with him," he said, staring at a bare space on the floor.

"Who?" Rosanna asked, quieter than before, her eyes locked on aggron and Nat.

"Andrew," Wallace said without thought. "He should be by aggron, they should be together."

Rosanna shook her head as she backed away from the table and caressed her sewaddle's head. "Wallace, who's Andrew?"

Wallace backed up into totodile's table before he slumped to the floor and curled his knees into his chest and began rocking. "Nat, he should be with his team. They're in his room, still on the belt, waiting for him. In Lumiose, if we just get there, we can get them, they can be together. They _have_ to be together!" Wallace said as he cut through the air with his hands, emphasizing each point.

"Lumiose?" Rosanna asked as she stopped at the corner of aggron's table and crouched down. "Wallace, are you okay?"

"Fine! I'm fine! Andrew – Nat – he needs to be with his team, I did that," Wallace said as he pointed to the table. "See? They're together. They can't be apart, Nat's dead and his team will never know what happened."

"Nat is alive," Rosanna said, speaking slowly and plainly to Wallace. "Wallace, who is Andrew?"

Wallace clutched at his ankles as he started rocking more violently, his back banging against the leg of totodile's table. "Who?" he asked before his vacant stare snapped up to meet Rosanna's face, filled with worry. Wallace stared at Rosanna until his breathing stopped for a moment before his chest came alive with a spasm, his breathing became quickened and pant-like.

The ground seemed to shift under him and the room swayed before, unceremoniously, Wallace fell over. His head impacting the ground rattled his mind like a ricocheting bullet inside his skull. His surroundings blurred as his breaths came out as uneven puffs punctuated by staccato intakes.

Rosanna inched toward him just as he emitted a low wailing sound that grew and fell in intensity. There was an urgent fire in his head, a kind of heat like metal on the stove burning like a halo around his mind. A second later, he felt the sensation of opening, as if his skin had peeled open from its crown. A numbing chill took over as it felt like his flesh curled outwards, exposing his skull and brain, cleaved open like his scalp. But as quick as the feeling swept over it, it slammed shut as his mind and body seemed to clamp back together with a mighty smack.

As he focused, Wallace noticed Rosanna crouching in front of him, her hand raised flat to him. "What?" he asked, his mouth tasted like acid as he cleared his throat.

"You were freaking out," Rosanna said. "I thought you were having a seizure. I slapped you. Are you okay?"

Wallace stretched out his jaw and rubbed his stinging cheek. "I'm fine," he said, his cheeks burning from more than Rosanna's slap. Just as he sat up the doors to the room burst open and Don, Eleanor, and Izumi bounded in, their arrival startling Rosanna and Wallace.

"You're okay," Rosanna breathed as she sloppily got to her feet and rushed her cousin, the two colliding in a hug.

Wallace let himself go slack as he fell back on the floor, relief flooding him that the others were safe. Izumi limped around the edge of the room, looking over Nat and aggron, but Eleanor slipped past Don and Rosanna and fell to Wallace's side and swept him up in a hug.

"Eh?" Wallace asked as his face pressed into Eleanor's shoulder, the smell of berry shampoo filling his nostrils.

"I didn't want to leave Izumi's side after he got hit so I pulled him back under the pews. I didn't know what happened and then everything got quiet," Eleanor said as she released him and sat before him on the ground.

"Everyone is okay?"

"More or less," Izumi said as he used aggron's observation table to support himself. "Well, that's not creepy."

Wallace swallowed hard and avoided looking towards the table and instead focused on a locket dangling from Eleanor's neck.

"Is Paladin, gone?" Don asked as he and Rosanna neared the table.

"I think his burns were too bad," Rosanna said as she rubbed the pokémon's head. "Wallace and I were about to come back for you, but I wanted Nat to be here so I put him on the table."

Wallace cast a look in Rosanna's direction, but they didn't lock eyes. "Where are Chara and James?"

"James is still alive, he was able to call out a xatu. He used it teleport him and Chara out of the chapel." Eleanor sighed deeply before she shook her head. "I'm sorry, it didn't work. They're on the run again."

"It doesn't matter, we're okay," Wallace said as he nudged Eleanor's hand and their fingers entwined and squeezed. "I just want this night to be over."

"The police swarmed the chapel right as we left," Don said. "They wanted an explanation, but the head nurse said she'd talk to them."

Wallace nodded and he and Eleanor stood up. "Your parents?"

Don paled and jolted in his spot. "I forgot! They're probably freaking out."

"Go, I'll stay with Nat," Rosanna offered.

Don gave his cousin a long hug before he darted from the room. "Be right back!"

"Ellie." Wallace glanced in Rosanna's direction before he looked back to his feet. "Would you mind going with Izumi – my dad – and finding the nurses? They're probably going to want to check on Nat, he's been through a lot."

Eleanor smiled as she backed up, passing glances between Rosanna and Wallace. "Of course, do you guys need anything?"

"No thank you," Rosanna said.

"We'll be uh, right back," Izumi said as he backed out of the room.

Once Eleanor and Izumi left and the doors stopped moving, Wallace felt the silence weigh down on the room and the noise of his breathing sounded all too loud. "You told him it was me?" he asked, gently.

Rosanna walked around the observation table and stopped just a few paces behind Wallace. "I don't know what happened to you, or what this was about," she said, her hand gesturing to Nat's resting form. "But I think it was something personal. I don't really know you, but I saw you do a lot to save my cousins. So thank you."

* * *

Wallace reclined beneath one of the larger trees in the field outside of the Health and Wellness Center, elgyem floating lazily in the grass around him picking flowers. Each time the sliding doors of the Center opened, Wallace perked up, but usually, it was a random patient exiting. Occasionally, officers from nearby cities and towns departed, all called in because of Chara's appearance on campus to search for clues and take statements, but hours after he and James vanished from the chapel the search on campus was over.

Wallace watched as several officers left the building and released braviary onto the lawn before they climbed onto their backs and took off. The gust from the flying-types wingspan caused Wallace to shield his eyes and nearly miss Rosanna, Don, Cosmo and their parents leaving the building.

Wallace dropped a flower whose petals he had plucked off as Nurse Joie emerged followed by a particularly chubby chansey. "Don," he said, grabbing the family's attention.

"Wallace," Nurse Joie said. "Don just told us what you and your elgyem did for Nat. I think that was very brave of you to face those individuals like that."

"We really appreciate what you've done for our family," Don's mother said.

"It's just sad that students have to worry about such things," Don's father said as he looked over his shoulder to the nurse. "Those two boys, they escaped and are still at large."

Nurse Joie's face became tight as she smiled. "I'm sure our officers will do everything they can to find them and ensure the safety of your students."

"What's going to happen to Nat?" Wallace asked as he looked towards the building.

"Although Mrs. and Mr. Freelily wanted to take Nat home with them, I convinced them the best treatment for Nat would be here," Nurse Joie said.

"We all will stop by to check on him daily," Don's father said.

"O-Of course," Nurse Joie said, her smile widening, but Wallace was sure he saw a bead of sweat dribble down her forehead.

"Wait, we all?" Wallace asked brow cocked.

"They want us to come home for a bit," Don said, his eyes fixed on the ground.

"What?" Wallace asked, glancing from Don to Cosmo and then to their parents who returned his gaze with glares. "Wouldn't it be better to have them here, to watch over Nat all day every day?"

"We're having guards placed around Nat's room at all times, if Cosmo and Don are targets having them spread across campus would complicate things," Nurse Joie said. "The university will do its best to keep their schoolwork coming and keep them on track for the year while they spend the semester off campus. If you send us a list we can have the boy's school supplies sent home."

"You're leaving right away?" Wallace asked, his voice rising.

"Elgyy," elgyem cried as he floated to Cosmo and wrapped his small arms around the boy's head.

"It's just for a little while," Cosmo said rubbed elgyem's back. "I'll be back."

"I just wonder who's going to take care of the flowers while I'm gone," Don said as he folded his arms behind his head and sighed.

"That's not funny," Wallace said, sucking at his teeth. "You might fall behind in your classes."

Don shrugged, but smiled. "My grades are fine."

"But your friends won't get to talk to you," Wallace said, pressing the matter.

"They can send letters or call, we don't live in a cave," Don laughed.

Wallace furrowed his brow at Don's dismissal, but then a wave of emotion washed over him and he reached forward. One hand landed on Don's back and he pulled him in for a quick hug, but the moment they collided Wallace wrapped his other arm around Don, suddenly afraid to let go. "I'll miss you," he said. "Stay safe while you're gone."As Wallace waited for Don to return the hug, he became aware of the eyes on them but didn't consider letting go until Don began to pat his back.

As Cosmo and elgyem finished their goodbyes the family gathered together beside Nurse Joie's chansey. All too familiar with teleportation, Wallace turned away as the Freelily's and Rosanna vanished behind a wall of light.

"Wallace, your father is inside but refusing treatment," Nurse Joie said once the light faded. "Could you talk some sense into him? Maybe stop inside yourself so we can check you out, you went through a lot today," she said before she retreated through the doors.

"Not happening," he said under his breath. Wallace waited for the doors to close before he backed up to the tree and picked the flower up from the grass and plucked the last petal off.

Just a minute after the nurse left the doors opened and Izumi darted out, looking over his shoulder as if someone had followed him. "She's out of her mind if she thinks I'm letting them examine me," he said as he straightened his shirt.

Wallace exhaled as he eyed the man who had kept up the person of his father. Despite James's garchomp attacking him and James smacking with a wooden board he looked alright. "You should let them do a check-up, you went through a lot today," he said, mocking the nurse.

"No way," Izumi said as he finger combed his hair. "Let's just say I, like you, have reasons for not wanting doctors or police looking into me and my business."

"Okay, Izumi, if that even is your real name," Wallace said, forcing a smile.

"What's eating you?" Izumi asked as he leaned against the tree with Wallace. "And what's got you picking petals off flowers, girlfriend break your heart?"

"Elgy!" Elgyem jabbed Izumi in the jaw with his hand, the red digit flashing as a warning.

"Alright, alright," Izumi said as he rubbed his cheek. "I'll leave it alone."

"Thanks for your help today," Wallace said quietly as he looked to his feet. "Your clefable helped a lot."

"All part of the job, I guess," Izumi said as he squinted at the sky. The storm clouds had vanished and the blue sky beneath was clear, allowing the sun to warm the dewy grass. "So, what's next?"

"Figure out who left those notes for Eleanor and I? Wait for James and Chara to return?" Wallace said with a shrug before he took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. "Figure out the other two people they work with."

"Two?" Izumi asked.

"James mentioned something about Orphans when he said the kind of work he and Chara do," Wallace said before he wet his lips. "And he held up four fingers, I think there are four of them. They do different things and why they do it differs, but there are four, somewhere."

"Want me to look into it?" Izumi asked. "I don't know how much help I'll be, but I can put some feelers out, see what I find."

"Thank you," Wallace said as he kicked off from the tree. "I should go, I'm dead tired."

"Right. Oh, before I forget." Izumi jerked off from the tree and pulled a phone from his pocket as he came to Wallace's side. "I wanted to show you something I found inside. I went back to the chapel, claiming I left something behind and found this on the floor," Izumi said as he launched the gallery on his phone and held it out on the first photo.

Wallace narrowed his eyes at the screen before he grabbed the phone and held it flat in his palms. On the screen, he saw his name, the name PEARCE, carved into the carpet of the chapel by what had to be a knife.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ As of chapter nineteen the story passed 100 reviews and that's incredible! Thank you to everyone who's submitted a character for me to work with and big thanks to my friends/fellow writers: Shiny Eeveeee, The Awkward Trumpet, Oly in Flight, Fallen Lightning, and everyone else who reads and enjoys the story, your reactions to the chapters keep me enthused.

 **Question of the Chapter #19:** What do you think the Orphans connection to Wallace is?


	21. Survival of the Fittest

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter** **Twenty-One** **–** **Survival of the Fittest 1**

 _We die to each other daily – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace ran the tip of his pen across the front of his ethics notebook until the groove became deep enough that his pen pierced the top page. While Professor McCloud engaged a chunk of the first year trainers, all gathered on one of the southern safari islands for a team assignment, Wallace looked over the face of his notebook at the series of tally marks he'd made. Wallace etched a total of nine marks into the top right of his notebook, one for each day that had passed without the world ending.

Because the report that went out about Andrew's private video culminated with Chara's return to campus and Nat being burned, Wallace had dubbed the second of September the precursor to the end of the world. Since then Wallace had developed a mantra for himself that he practiced in the bathroom mirror: _'Another day, another lie. Until the end, however, it may come.'_ The end of the broadcast of Andrew's final video or his father went to the police in a fit of anger after being accused of the murder or Chara and the other Orphans returning.

The first two possibilities were fresh on his mind as every news channel the university broadcasted changed its focus from recounting the details of Andrew's disappearance to investigating his death. While some replayed the story of the divers finding the holocaster – confirmed as Andrew's by its product number – in the water, others replayed the videos of Arlan being escorted out of his office and the clips of him leaving the police station, as smug as ever. Reporters were interviewing Andrew's mother and trainers Andrew had known as well as important men and women from other regions. During breakfast, before heading to the docks, Wallace watched Professor Juniper of Unova give a watery-eyed account of the day she met Andrew and wish his family peace in their troubling times.

As he flipped to the back of his notebook, Wallace's paranoia had him hunching his shoulders forward and practically hovering over the page. The entirety of the first year class had been split up among the safari islands with only twelve of them sent along with Wallace to an island a mile south of campus. Despite having written messy and extremely small words, Wallace couldn't shake the feeling that one of his classmates, sitting in the sand around him, might take an interest in the thoughts he'd penned into the back page.

The possibilities for what Andrew's final video could be plagued Wallace's dreams and eventually found themselves scrawled into his notebook. A body cam was at the top of the list, one that captured their fight that night, but he crossed it out, the option being impossible with Andrew dead. Others high on the list were a video of his birthday party, a clip that showed Arlan in the midst of stealing money, and at the very bottom was the innocuous entry that it was just a random video.

Though the chances seemed small, Wallace kept the faith that the last video was just of Andrew thanking people for his party and maybe announcing he was going out to travel again. He hated himself for it, but he actually prayed for something that would back-up the story his father had put out. Though that lie wouldn't matter anymore once Carrie's admission that she felt Andrew was dead came true, the cover-up story would only further incriminate those who spread it.

"Until the end, however, it may come," Wallace muttered as his eyes drifted from his notebook. Setting the notebook aside, Wallace dropped his hands into his lap where elgyem was sitting in the sand, his stubby hands burrowing into the beach. While Professor McCloud was talking Wallace figured paying even a modicum of attention to what they were doing in the safari would be a smart choice, but the sight of Neo in front of him drew his attention away from the professor.

The brown-haired boy was sitting in the sand in front of him, and over his shoulder, Wallace could see the screen of his tablet flashing as a video played on it. Straining to see past the sun's glare on the tablet screen, Wallace could just make out the typical set up for news reports on the screen. A woman was sitting behind a large desk and speaking to the camera while letters and images popped up on the screen.

Wallace found himself leaning forward, squishing elgyem, and hoping Neo had the volume on and he might catch even a second of the audio, but just as he thought he caught a snip of the news caster's voice the tablet screen went black and Neo spun around.

"Hi," Wallace said, a little out of breath as Neo's emerald green eyes seemed to plunge daggers of disdain into his chest.

Neo's lips twitched before he turned back and sat up straight. "Mind your business," he whispered back.

Wallace's eyes flicked around the beach, everyone was else watching the professor who was walking in circles where the beach turned into forest. "Are you still mad at me?" he asked as he sat back and elgyem popped out of his lap.

"Are you still a dick?" Neo fired back.

Wallace pursed his lips, but inched forward in the sand, practically breathing against the back of Neo's head. "I've tried to say I'm sorry. Before classes, when I run into you and Garret in the halls, the café, anywhere, doesn't matter. Every time I try you act like you don't want me around."

"Because I don't," Neo whispered, his voice sharp and raspy. He glanced towards the professor, still absorbed in her speech, before he eased turned around. "I don't need to remind you that you yelled at and basically accused Ellie of going after another person's pokémon. I know you don't read a lot, but that's high on the university's code of conduct, unnecessary force or violence against students or pokémon. Not like it even matters though, because it was a _murderer's_ pokémon. It's not like the world will be mourning that loss. And then you attacked Garret, who was only trying to help."

"Eleanor and I are fine now. And I've tried to apologize to Garret," Wallace said again, articulating each word as he held his hands out, palms up, to Neo. "To you too."

"You don't get it," Neo said with a smirk as he turned forward again. "If you really wanted our forgiveness, and I mean really wanted it, not wanted it because you think it's the right thing to do and you're tired of us brushing you off. If you really cared and wanted to make things right you'd just apologize to him, not me, because you don't owe me anything. You wouldn't care what I say, or what I do, you'd just make things right."

Wallace opened his mouth to reply when Professor McCloud whirled around and clapped her hands together. "Mr. Peters and Mr. Spring, do you think you're too good for this assignment?"

"Well, actually – "

"No, ma'am," Wallace said. "We'll stop, sorry." Wallace's eyes flicked to the sand at McCloud's feet, her mudkip had been furiously digging in the sand, but paused when its trainer addressed the students.

McCloud grimaced, seemingly unpleased by Wallace's compliance before she went back to pacing the beach.

Just as Wallace shifted back on the sand, a phone came flying over and landed beside his foot. Wallace glanced over to see Ignatius beside him, nodding to the phone and the pair of earbuds attached. Wallace looked at the earbuds warily before he heard Ignatius's throaty laugh.

"I'm extremely clean," he said as he rubbed the shell of his trapinch, lying prone across the sand, napping.

Wallace smiled and fingered one of the buds into his ear, careful to lean into that side of his head to keep the wire hidden as he tapped the phone's screen. A video sat in the middle of an article written about the Gates family and as the video started, Wallace listened to two reporters on the split screen go at it.

"It's been a week and a half since this whole private video was announced and already there are many petitions and campaigns being started, all in favor of playing the video. The largest of these campaigns is even called PRESS PLAY. I think that shows there is a large demand for the video to be played, it's an honor to Andrew's memory and all that he's done for the world of trainers."

"Of course you're only looking at one side! For every group wanting this video to be shown I can guarantee you there are two more wanting for to it stay private! Now more than ever, due to the confession from Andrew's own mother, Carrie Mantle, who used to be a top executive for Pearce Productions, people are saying if it's true Andrew is dead then his last video needs to stay private. Let it be viewed by family only, if they choose, and I think we need to respect that."

Wallace watched the bickering reporters be separated on screen by a third box that appeared between them. An older man appeared in the box, staring ahead with dull colorless eyes. "Well, I'm here with Mr. Gates himself," the man said. "Charles, what do you think should happen in regards to the PRESS PLAY movement?"

Wallace let out a low gasp as the view in the middle screen widened to take in Charles. Andrew's father looked as drained of color as the man interviewing him had. His face was pale and droopy and dark circles haloed his glassy red eyes. His blond hair, usually kept short and coiffed, had grown out a bit and stuck up in odd places.

"I'm against it," Charles said, his voice wet. "I want my son's final words to remain private."

"His final words," the interviewing man said. "So then you believe the claim your ex-wife made, that Andrew is in fact dead?"

Charles nodded, his face pinched into tight folds and creases. "I don't think he's out there traveling, doing what he loved. I think someone took him and someone killed him." Charles leaned forward before he cupped his face in his hands and sobbed, his shoulders jumping with intakes of air before he sat back up. "I think someone killed my boy," he said, his voice high.

"Do you have any idea who?"

"No." Charles licked his lips before he wiped at his face. "No. I don't know who would want to hurt him, everyone loved him. But someone did, someone hurt him and now I just want it all to end."

The sound of hands clapping again snapped Wallace out of his trance as he watched Charles continue to sob on video. Nearly flinging Ignatius's phone across the beach, Wallace sat up straight to find McCloud and most of the other students staring at him.

"Were you listening to something more important than the reasoning behind today's assignment?" McCloud asked in a growl.

"No, I'm sorry." Wallace regarded her with a weak smile.

"I've got team listings in my hand," McCloud said, brandishing a single page of paper. "Three to a team and the goal is simple. Your teams will be spaced out around the beaches of the island. At the center of the island there is a box that has to be opened in order for your team to be claimed the winner."

Wallace nibbled at his lip, drifting as he listened to McCloud's explanation as he watched his classmates. Some of them seem, Arlette, looked nervous as McCloud explained the assignment, while others looked hungry and ready to begin.

"In order to open the box you'll need these," McCloud said as she reached around her neck and pulled a set of four ancient looking keys from around her neck. Each of the keys was colored differently, red, green, blue, and yellow. "Each team will be given one key to start and only by encountering the other teams will you be able to collect the keys."

"So we have to battle for the keys?" Calvin asked, lounging back in the sand, his head resting in Persia's lap.

"However you decide to give up or barter for keys is up to you," McCloud said. "But keep in mind, if one team wants to fight and your team doesn't, there's nothing saying the other team has to abide. Any and all tricks are welcome and allowed. It's survival of the fittest in there."

Wallace took in a deep breath as his stomach bottomed out, imagining all the ways someone might play dirty for a key. Beyond McCloud the trees in the forest rustled before six students emerged and joined the professor on the beach.

"I've brought six upper-class students with me," McCloud said. "They'll either be helping you or working against you on the island. The choice is up to the student highest in class," she said as she glanced at three girls to her right.

Wallace's eyes darted to a group of three girls standing beside the professor: Eleanor, Azalea, and a tall modelesque girl wearing an oversized sweater that made it seem like she'd decided to forgo pants that day. Her hair was a rich and curly brown that fell down her back.

"Hi, I'm Eleanor Ampora, third-year student," Eleanor said with a short wave to the crowd before she pushed her glasses up her nose. "I decided that my group will help whichever team we come across."

Wallace breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at Eleanor, even though she hadn't seemed to notice him. Even her appearance had calmed him, her jean shorts and light grey hoodie instantly reminded him of the day they met during the safari tour and how it felt for her to come to his rescue from Chara.

"And over here we have –" McCloud started.

"Team Blaze is running counter on any first years who are unfortunate to cross us," a frail looking boy stated, stepping forward from his line. His hair, wild and black, fell around his head in a riotous manner above a pair of large light eyes.

Wallace's eyes fell from his face to his legs where the rich brown flesh on his skins was marred by patches of glossy and discolored skin.

"Thank you, Cole. Cole is a fourth year who joined the university this semester?" McCloud said. "Is that right?"

"Nah, I've been around for a while," Cole said as he stepped back in line beside Kolton and Travis, leaning on the latter's shoulder.

Wallace felt his worry growing as he looked over Team Blaze. Cole seemed fairly aggressive, he knew he was low on the list of people Kolton liked, and he simply wasn't a fan of Travis who practically drooled over Tempest.

"So you've got one team working as allies and the other as enemies, very nice. Come up and receive your teams and when you've gathered with your team members I'll tell you where your team is starting from and give you your key," McCloud said as she pulled the keys from her neck.

Wallace stayed put on the sand as his classmates all got up and rushed to the professor. In no rush to get his team, Wallace stayed seated with elgyem who had taken to levitating clumps of sand around himself like planets in orbit.

"Calvin Thompson and Nero Spring."

Wallace craned his neck up to see Ignatius standing beside him. "Hm?"

"My team," Ignatius said as he dropped his hands on his hips. "Calvin and Nero."

"That's Neo," Neo said as he butted his way into the conversation. "And if this team is going to claim victory you won't call me anything else," he said as he cast Ignatius a look before he eyed Wallace.

"I was just reading what was on the paper, heh," Ignatius said as he adjusted his snapback. "Nero."

Neo cleared his throat rather roughly as he twisted a strand of his hair and scanned the beach. "Have you seen the last on our team?"

"Here I am!" Calvin announced as he popped up behind Neo and Ignatius, his arms hooking around their necks. "Let's go bros! We've got keys to collect. I'm calling it now, Team Brains and Brawn are gonna bring it home."

"Brains and Brawn?" Ignatius asked.

"This one," Calvin said as he stretched around Neo and flicked the screen of his tablet. "Is the brain. I don't know about you," he said to Ignatius as he let go of the boys and struck a pose in the sand and flexed. "But I'm the brawn!"

Wallace jotted down _TEAM BB (Brains & Brawn)_, along with the names of the boys in his notebook before he noticed some of the first year girls eyeing Calvin from across the beach. Heading down the beach a group of three girls was being held together by Simone, her arms linked the three together as Calvin had done. Wallace quickly jotted _Simone, Persia,_ and _Arlette_ 's names down beside a made-up team name: _Team Femme._

"Whatever. Let's get going, we're on the north side of the island, that'll give us time to discuss strategy," Neo said as he nodded up the beach and powered up his tablet.

Ignatius regarded Wallace with a large shrug before followed Neo and Calvin. Once they were gone, Wallace scanned the rest of the beach. Johnny was standing in front of Garret and Christopher, the three seemed to be involved in some kind of conversation, though Wallace couldn't imagine what Johnny expected to get out of a boy that didn't talk and one that was as quiet as the wind. _Team_ _MPPOC_ , Wallace scrawled into his notebook along with their names.

"Elgy, everyone is paired up," he said as he realized he'd written down three teams of three, meaning the only ones left on the beach would be his team.

Elgyem clambered back onto his lap and rested his hands on the paper and studied the words. Briefly, Wallace wondered if elgyem could even read or if he was just making the effort. "What do you think?"

"Elgy?" Elgyem flashed the green digit on his hand as he pointed across the beach to where Ben was moseying over, his arms folded behind his back and his body language timid.

"Hi, Ben," Wallace said as he waited for the boy to reach him.

"Hi," Ben said with a curt wave as he stopped a few feet from Wallace and wavered there, looking conflicted on if he wanted to sit down or remain standing. "We're teammates."

"Yeah, I kind of figured that," Wallace said as he glanced at his list. "I wrote down the other teams. I don't really know why," he said as he offered the notebook, but regretted it instantly remembering his paranoid list and tally marks.

Ben squatted beside Wallace and looked over the paper before he hopped back up. "Team MPPOC? What's that stand for?"

"Something my mom used to say," Wallace said, surppressing a laugh. "My dad used to travel a lot for work and when he wasn't home it'd be so calm without him walking around making business calls all the time my mom used to say the house was so quiet you could hear a mouse pokémon pissing on cotton." Wallace wet his lips as his chest jumped a few times, an internal laugh, but he couldn't help it and hunched over as he let out a short fit of giggles.

"That's funny," Ben said, though Wallace's infectious laughter didn't reach him. "Simone seemed surprised we weren't on the same team. She said she'd make it her mission that we didn't win, but don't worry, she means well, she just loves competition," he said as he held out the paper from McCloud with the team assignments on it."

"I can tell," Wallace said as he narrowed his eyes at the paper, his hand hovering over his notebook as he wrote in the last team. "Ben Rider and Carl Valrek, I don't know him," Wallace said as he wrote _Team Safari_ beside the names.

"He's over there," Ben said, pointing to a boy that was standing a few yards from the professor, hands in his pockets and kicking at the sand.

Wallace held his hand like a visor to his eyes, but Carl stood further up on the beach, his body backlit and his face featureless and shadowy. "Did you talk to him?" he asked as got up and swatted sand from his butt.

Ben shook his head and followed beside Wallace who headed for their teammate. "He didn't introduce himself or anything, I didn't want to bother him, he kind of looked upset."

"Boys, gather together. I had the upperclassman take the other teams around the island to their starting points, but you three can start here," McCloud said as she ushered the boys in together. "Something I told the others, you'll only be permitted to use one pokémon to aid you during the exercise. So pick wisely."

"Elgy?" elgyem said curiosity as he floated up beside Wallace and draped himself over his shoulder.

"Of course," Wallace said as he rubbed elgyem's head.

"I'll choose you," Ben said to a ball in his hand before he touched the locking button and the ball released a small dragon-type onto the beach.

Instinctively, Wallace backed up as a gabite stood before Ben, its tail swhishing around and its mouth snapping shut. Even though it was less dangerous looking than its evolution, the memory of James's garchomp attacking Izumi was far too fresh in his mind. Still eyeing the rowdy looking gabite, Wallace missed Carl letting out a shiny red scizor who buzzed close to its trainer.

"Alright, here is your key," McCloud said as she held out the red key. "Who wants to hold it. You can change who carries it whenever you want and there are no rules on where you keep it. But if you hold it in plain sight you'll become a target, so it's better to give it to someone who can handle themselves." McCloud dangled the key from the end of a long string before the boys like they were pokémon waiting for a treat.

From the corner of his eye, Wallace saw Ben physically back away from the swinging key and got a good look at Carl. His skin was medium toned, though whether it was natural or a tan he couldn't tell and he was somewhere between Ben and Wallace when it came to height. Dark blond hair hung in waves around his ears and his dark green eyes stared plainly ahead at the professor while he made no move to claim the key.

"I'll take it," Wallace said, reluctantly, as he held his hand out.

"Best of luck guarding it, Mr. Peters," McCloud said as he dropped the key and the string pooled on Wallace's palm. "And boys, best of luck in the forest. Head in when you're ready."

* * *

 _August 11th – Stupid Girl_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _Things have only gotten worse. The weather took a turn for the worse. It started raining hard and the wind picked up. Once we reached the more swampy areas of the Nature Trail every step we took got our feet stuck in the mud. We've come across a lot of trainers and we weren't prepared for it. We found the abandoned house. Our teams are resting now, but Elroy is the only one left who's able to fight and we still have a few hours of walking left until we get to Laverre. I tried to make things right with Andrew, but it backfired. I tried to help him break down his tent this morning and pack up, but he thought I was trying to snoop through his things. I wasn't, honestly._

 _His Holocaster went off again. He walked off to answer it, but I could still hear him. I've never eavesdropped on anyone before, and I wasn't trying to start, but he was talking kind of loud. Yelling, actually. There was a girl on the other end, she yelled too. I only caught bits and pieces of their conversation, but from what I gathered it seems like Andrew maybe had plans to see another girl when he came back to Kalos… I didn't say anything when he came back, but I think he saw it in my face. I'm not very good at hiding emotions when it comes to something like that. But it's my fault. I put too much faith in this trip. I was silly to think after nine years he could still feel the same way about me. I'm not mad, not at Andrew. Mad at myself maybe. I just want to get to Laverre, heal my team, and go home..._

 _Sadly Yours, Arlette B._

* * *

Wallace palmed sweat from his brow as he folded up the page from Arlette's diary and scanned the horizon beyond his teammates as they traveled through the island in search of other teams. Judging by how amped some of the other teams seemed to win the challenge to collect four keys, Wallace had been grateful for not seeing any of the other teams yet, but over time their absence was becoming eerie.

Turning back, Wallace was unable to see the beach anymore and his anxiety rocketed. With every step, Wallace felt more and more worried about some kind of attack. It was inconceivable that they could possibly travel so far into the island, so close to the winner's box, without encountering one of the other teams. Maybe it was the calm silence of the safari, or being away from campus, the first time since Chara's appearance in the abandoned mansion, or both that had Wallace feeling on edge more than usual.

Instinctively, Wallace reached up to nudge elgyem's foot to comfort himself. Apparently startled, elgyem made a high machine-like whine as he batted at Wallace's hand. "Sorry, buddy. I'm nervous," Wallace said before he touched a hand to the bulge in his pocket, spinarak's ball. After receiving their key from McCloud Wallace gave it to spinarak to hold and promptly recalled him into his ball, figuring it was as safe a place as any to hide it.

Panning his gaze forward, Wallace looked over their formation with Ben and his gabite, Angelica, ahead of him, shoulders slumped and his feet dragging across the ground. He hated to admit it, but without Simone around, what light Ben had seemed to fade away. Either that or the safari had the same effect on him, or it was perhaps the presence of the other team member, Carl.

Carl walked at the front of their line, as silent as he'd been on the beach, his scizor's wings buzzing beside him as it kept watch. While Ben seemed extremely focused on the placement of his feet, Wallace hoped Carl and his scizor had noticed the unsettling calmness of the forest, and that he wasn't alone in his paranoia.

From the corner of his eye Wallace saw a glint of light flash off scizor's red exoskeleton, looking forward Wallace saw the pincer pokémon standing alert beside Carl who looked equally on edge, eyes trained on the trees.

"They're coming," Ben said, his voice making the statement sound more like a question.

Wallace pulled the page of from his notebook out and unfolded it to find his list scrawled inside:

 _Team BB (Brains & Brawn) - Neo, Ignatius, Calvin_

 _Team Femme – Arlette, Simone, Persia_

 _Team MPPOC – Garret, Johnny, Kit_

 _Team Safari – Me, Carl, Ben_

 _Team Blaze (Foe) – Cole, Kolton, Travis (Upperclass)_

 _Team Friend – Eleanor, Azalea, Model Girl (Upperclass)_

Looking away from the paper, Wallace focused on the rustling sound coming through clear from the tree line. Unless it was a random encounter, he didn't expect Team Handicap to target them, even if he and Garret weren't exactly on good terms. With Simone at the lead, her team was likely to attack, as was Neo's team. But what came through the trees was a large and wooly brown pokémon with curved off-white tusks that were chipped and scratched. Kolton and Travis emerged on either side of the pokémon while Cole rode on top, looking as regal as could be as they crossed the path.

"It looks like Will found us some prey," Cole said as he scratched the head of his mount. "Good job."

"Ma-mo!" his pokémon groaned out as it stomped down on the path.

"Which one of you has the key?" Cole asked as he dead-eyed each of the boys. "I'll get nothing by taking all four keys to the box except the satisfaction of not letting any scrawny first years win."

Wallace furrowed his brows as Carl turned around in their formation and looked back at him, he wanted for him to face forward, as if looking back might be the only clue they needed.

"I have it," Carl said. "Or had it. We hid it a while back. We were out looking for another team to get their key and then we were going to put them together, but keep them hidden. I won't tell you where it's hidden."

Wallace eyed Carl's back before he scanned the faces of Team Blaze. Kolton and Travis were exchanging looks before they cast their gazes up to Cole who had his arms crossed over his chest.

Cole hummed, a sense of urgency vibrating from his throat. "McCloud said anyone could carry the key and it doesn't have to stay static," he said flatly, before he pointed to Ben. "I think you have it. Hand it over or I'll have my mamoswine freeze-dry your gabite."

Wallace saw Ben physically go frigid as Cole turned his attention on him, his hands clenched into fists at his sides before they uncurled and Ben rubbed his palms on his shorts.

"Wh-What?" Ben asked.

"K-E-Y, I want the key," Cole said, holding his hand out in a fetching manner. "McCloud gave it to you didn't see? The weakest in the bunch."

Wallace glanced to Ben's gabite, standing prone at its trainer's side, snapping its jaws at Cole every few seconds. Between scizor, gabite, and elgyem, Wallace was sure he was the weakest in the group, though he'd never seen the other two battle.

"No, no, I don't – I don't know," Ben stammered, his head turning left and right as he looked toward the forest as if looking for a way to escape from Cole's scrutiny.

"You don't know what? If she gave you the weak or if you're the weakest?" Cole asked as he shifted forward on his pokémon and slid down its fur to land beside Travis.

Wallace saw Ben's mouth move as if he had uttered a sentence in another language before he looked off to the side. "I don't remember, I don't know," Ben said as he swallowed what sounded like a lump in his throat. "I don't know who she gave the key too."

Cole looked slightly offended. "How could you not know who? You were there weren't you?"

Wallace's hand twitched at his side as he focused his attention on Ben. With every question, Cole came closer and Ben seemed to be breaking down just in his presence. From just a few feet away Wallace saw a bead of sweat ran slide down Ben's forehead.

"I – I was, but I... I don't know, I didn't – I didn't get the key," Ben managed to say, his voice breaking and his body jerking at odd intervals.

"Oh, so you don't have the key?" Cole asked, his tone less threatening.

"No, I don't."

Cole wet his lips before pursing them, narrowing his eyes at Ben. "But you said you didn't know who got the key. If don't know who got it how come you know it wasn't you?"

"I—uh—I don't really remember, but I'm sure, I know it wasn't me, It – I – I don't know," Ben said before his head fell forward and he pinched his eyes shut, mouth moving a mile a minute as he muttered to himself.

"Who has the key?" Cole said sternly as he approached Ben and grabbed his chin, lifting his head until they were staring at each other.

Despite their height difference, Cole coming in at around Wallace's own height, Ben couldn't have looked like more of a child in front of the upperclassman.

Again Ben's mouth moved as if he was going to start several sentences at once, but anything he might have thought about saying seemed to deflate under Cole's intense stare.

"I don't know," Ben whispered.

"I'm sorry?" Cole asked sweetly as he leaned in closer, turning his ear toward Ben. "I didn't hear you."

"I don't know, sir," Ben said, his voice shaking.

Wallace was taken aback by Ben calling him sir and glanced past the two to see Carl standing just as still as him. Ahead of them Kolton and Travis were leaving the mamoswine's side and heading for Cole.

"I can't stand liars," Cole said as he let go of Ben's face and grabbed by the front of his shirt. "Do you know why? Because it's the biggest insult you can give to someone! When you lie to me," Cole said as he pulled on Ben's shirt and forced the boy to lean over until they were face to face, Cole pressing his forehead to Ben's. "When you lie to me, you're saying ' _Cole, I think you're stupid enough to fall for this. You don't deserve the truth._ ' Is that it? You think I'm stupid?"

"N-No," Ben whined.

"Then tell me who has the key?" Cole barked, spit spraying Ben's face. "Give me the damn key, or I turn you and your dragon into ice cubes."

"Gaa!" Gabite circled Ben and Cole, its fangs and claws bared as it hissed.

"What – a – I don't know," Ben said before his face became pinched and it looked like he might break down and cry. "I'm sorry."

Cole tipped his head down to gabite and glare down at it. "Will, freeze-dry us!"

Wallace flinched as the mamoswine's tusks lit up blue and like two conducting poles a line of sizzling blue energy connected the two. "Is he gonna attack us all?" Wallace watched a small orb of light expand between mamoswine's tusks before a ray of light shot forth and struck the ground around Cole.

Wallace pulled elgyem from his shoulder and spun around, giving his back to what he presumed would be Cole's attack, but after a few moments of nothing happening, he spared a glance over his shoulder. The path between the mamoswine and Cole had been converted into a slick streak of ice. Carl and scizor had moved out of the way, but Ben's gabite had ended up in the line of attack and stood with sheets of frost and ice covering its scales. During the attack Cole had switched places with Ben, the taller boy's back taking part of the attack and Ben's shirt was frosted with pricks of ice over like a carton of ice cream pulled from the very bottom of the freezer.

Ben screeched as he ran his hands over his arms, clearing away sheets of ice before he tried to reach his gabite who stood frozen in the path. "Angelica!" Ben cried as he tried to tear himself away from Cole, to no avail.

"Key please," Cole said, attempting to sound sweet, but it came out as patronizing. "Or else things will get nasty," he said as he stretched out his leg and kicked gabite.

Wallace watched in horror as Ben's gabite didn't react to being kicked. The dragon-type fell over as if Cole had knocked over a statue, only it didn't shatter on impact.

"I don't have it," Ben whimpered as his legs sagged and he fell. "I swear, I don't have it. I don't have the key." Ben sat, slumped on the ground beside his gabite, shuddering for several moments.

"What did I say about liars?" Cole asked as he spun around and slipped his arm around Ben's neck and held it there.

Wallace watched the expression on Ben's face morph into something horrific as Cole acted like he might strangle him. Ben's hands came up, clawing and grasping as Cole's forearm while his legs kicked up dirt and grass.

"Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!" Ben shrieked, his voice cracking with every word, his spastic movements becoming too much to watch.

Although he hadn't seen what Chara had done to Ben, the moment he found Chara strangling Simone flashed into Wallace's mind. "Stop!" Wallace yelled at he pulled spinarak's ball out and released him. "Let him go, please!" Wallace crouched and grabbed spinarak, his hand clutching the key under spinarak's abdomen, the string looped around the pokémon's body a few times.

"I want the key, that's the rule," Cole said, his attention shifting to Wallace. "Technically I beat him in a battle," he said as he glanced over his shoulder to the fallen gabite. Cole glared at Ben, who was still trying to pry the arm off his neck, before he let go and grabbed Ben's wrist and twisted his arm behind him as he lifted Ben up and slammed him against a tree.

Ben cried out as his chest collided with the tree trunk, but Cole pulled him off and swept his foot between Ben's legs, knocking the boy off balance. Wallace watched Ben tumble forward before Cole released him and Ben crashed onto the ground. The boy sputtered as he pulled himself up, dirt dotting his cheeks, before he seemed to realize he was free and crawled forward toward Carl.

"Right," Wallace said as he inched down the path towards Carl who took to standing in front of Ben. "You can have the key. I have it," he said as he pulled it from under spinarak and waved it in the air, wishing he would have given it up before Cole assaulted Ben. "Come get it."

One of Cole's brows cocked up and his mouth curved into a grin. "Don't play games with me," Cole warned as he strutted toward Wallace, hand out for the key.

"No games," Wallace breathed, eyes locked on Cole as he inched further down the path until he was standing beside Carl and Ben. "Elgyem, take us away," he gulped.

"Gyy!" Elgyem floated from Wallace's shoulder and hovered before him and Carl as the digits on his hands lit up.

Wallace watched as elgyem's light flooded the area around them and through it, he could see Cole's twisted face, pissed as all hell. In an instant, the lush greens of the forest were gone and the sturdy ground was replaced by loose shifting sand as they appeared on the beach.

The tension of the forest faded with the sound of waves lapping the shore and Wallace saw the expression on everyone's faces change into relief once they realized where they were. Somewhere in the forest Wallace heard a roaring yell, Cole no doubt. They were far enough away that he wasn't a threat, he couldn't possibly find them, but the sound of him yelling still shook him.

Recalling spinarak, Wallace pulled elgyem into his arms and planted a kiss on top of his head. "Thank you so much," he said as he squeezed the pokémon tight.

"Elgy!" he cooed back, but lit up the red digits on his hands as he pointed to Ben.

Wallace turned his attention to Ben, in the sand a few feet from Carl and scizor. He was leaning forward, his arms and face practically buried in the sand, his back jumping as he sobbed, his entire body quivering. Wallace approached slowly, letting elgyem climb back onto his shoulder, and as he came closer to Ben the wind picked up and something nipped his nose.

Wallace gulped down a pungent odor as he crouched near Ben, wanting to comfort him, but not having the slightest clue on how to do such a thing. "Ben? It's okay, we're safe now."

Ben's head turned to the side and Wallace could see his red and wet eyes along with lines of snot dribbling from his nose. "I'm sorry," he whimpered as he sat up, his hands coming together in his lap trying to cover a dark patch spreading from his crotch.

The sight of Ben's accident dealt a blow to Wallace's gut that knocked the wind out of him. His mouth moved, but he couldn't think of a single thing to say to make Ben feel any better. Hapless, he turned to Carl who came wandering over.

"It's fine, you didn't tell him where the key was," he offered. "I tried, but he saw through me. You did fine."

"No." Ben's mouth spread into a flat line, his eyes pinching shut and spilling tears down his face. "I would have told him, I just, I couldn't focus. I couldn't think, he scared me. He reminds me of..."

He didn't have to finish his sentence, Wallace knew where he was going and where Cole's attack had taken Ben. Just several miles north of the beach the abandoned mansion was still there, a distant, yet looming reminder. "I know," he said as he saw the patches of ice still clinging to Ben's shirt. "Why don't we stay here for a bit?" he offered, glancing to Carl who seemed as unreadable as ever, his face a blank slate. "The sun will get rid of this ice and we can take care of your gabite," he said as he looked up the beach. Ben's gabite was lying on its side in the sand, still as a statue with Carl's scizor looking over it.

"Okay," Ben breathed as he stood up and moved up the beach to his gabite and sat beside it. "Does anyone have any aspear berries? Maybe potions too."

Wallace blew air through his lips and pat his pockets, despite knowing he hadn't brought anything but elgyem and spinarak.

"I can help!" a voice from the trees announced.

Wallace leaped to his feet, though the airy voice couldn't have been Cole's. He watched some of the lower branches shift before the model-like girl from Eleanor's team emerged from the trees and bounced down the beach to Ben and gabite. "Who are you?" he asked.

"My friends call me Shay," she announced as she skipped past Ben and headed down the beach to Wallace. In a swift motion she scooped up his hand and lightly shook it before she grabbed his shoulders and kissed both of his cheeks. She skipped away and tried the same with Carl who swerved out of the way. "Ugh, rude," she scoffed at his dismissal of her greeting. "Anyway, I'm Shannon, Shannon Oxton, you might have heard of me," she said as she twirled a strand of her rich brown hair around her finger.

"Or we might not have," Carl said sharply. "But it's nice to meet you, I'm Carl."

Shannon smirked as she cocked her head to the side, her eyes narrowing at Carl. "Mm, you're kind of cute," she said with a wink before she whirled around and pranced back up the beach. "Ellie said we have to helpful little butterfrees today, so I'll help you here and now."

Wallace watched as she lifted up the bottom of her sweater, revealing she did, in fact, have shorts on, and pulled out a small package stuffed into her pocket. He watched as she crouched beside Ben and fed a berry in gabite's mouth before she handed a few bottles to Ben and pranced away.

"I gave him some medicine," Shannon said as she stopped short of Wallace and started walking around him, her finger trailing along his shoulder blades. "We can stay here until he's ready to go again, sound good?"

"We?" Wallace asked.

Shannon stopped in front of him and put her hands on her hips, her face, full of makeup, forming a shocked expression. "You weren't thinking of leaving me behind, were you? I can be of great service, in more than just the visual sense."

Wallace swallowed his reply and felt his cheeks burning. "Thanks for helping Ben."

"You're welcome, cutie," she said as she pinched Wallace's cheek. "So, while we wait how about we catch up on our tans? I mean, why come to the beach if we don't get some rays? Right?" she asked as she pulled off her sweater, revealing a bikini top beneath. Looking even more confident and sure of herself with less clothing on, Shannon watched Carl and Wallace. "Who's stripping first boys? I can't tan alone, it's no fun. Oh, my sun screen. You," she said softly as she gestured to Carl. "Can you grab it for me? It's in my bag up the beach."

Carl nodded and passed Wallace a look as he trudged up toward Ben and gabite.

"Now that we're alone," Shannon said as she grabbed the hem of Wallace's shirt. "Let's talk."

"Eh?" Wallace asked as he fought to keep his clothes on. "W-What? Talk about what?"

"Ignatius," Shannon said, her voice suddenly deep and serious. "I saw you two talking earlier. I want you to tell me everything you know about him. Pretend I know nothing about him."

Wallace narrowed his eyes at her. "How much _do_ you know about him?"

Shannon waved a hand in the air. "Details, things of little importance. I mean, it's not like I enrolled in this school in the middle of Kalos nowhere just because I heard he had gotten accepted or anything, heh. Now, back to business. You and I are going to tan and you are going to spill the beans on everything from what time he wakes up to what flavor of berry juice is his favorite," Shannon rattled off as she pulled at the neckline of Wallace's shirt and managed to force it off over his head, knocking elgyem from his perch.

Wallace stumbled back down the beach, crossing his arms over his chest as elgyem floated in front of him, arms raised and digits flashing in sequence. "Give me my shirt!"

Shannon swung his shirt around her finger like a prize before she draped it over her shoulder and pulled a ball from her waistline. "You wanna fight for it? Winner gets what they want? You can have your shirt and I get all the deets on my previous Iggy. Deal?"

"You're crazy," Wallace said, finding it difficult not to drop his arms. "Elgyem, are you ready?"

"Elgy!" elgyem cried out, his body glowing purple as he floated higher above Wallace. The lights on his hands flashed again before only the red digits lit up and he let out a low mechanical hum.

Shannon tossed her ball up a few times before she chucked it at the sand and the beach flooded with brilliant white light.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty-One

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Introducing **Cole** by **Oly in Flight** and **Shannon Oxton** by **The Pocketwatch Ripper.**

 **Question of the Chapter #20:** Which team do you think will win the assignment?


	22. I Loved Him

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter** **Twenty-** **Two** **–** **I Loved Him**

 _The last temptation is the greatest treason:  
_ _to do the right deed for the wrong reason. – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace clenched his fists, every inch of his body buzzing with a sensation that felt akin to a numbing mixture of nerves and excitement. Ben had drawn lines in the sand of the beach to outline a mock arena, half on land and half out of sight, trailed off into the crystalline blue waters of Azure Bay to suit Shannon, the upperclass-girl standing in the shallows.

The water beyond Shannon broke and a milotic coiled into the air, its scales glistening in the bright sun. "Melanie, sweetie, ready that water pulse!" Shannon said, a manicured finger pointing to Wallace.

"Elgy, we can't beat her," Wallace said, regret filling him for agreeing to fight. His eyes fell to elgyem's back who floated a few feet in front of him.

The cerebral pokémon turned and the parallel lines crossing his face sagged, his eyes dropping with the onset of defeat. "Elgyy," he beeped out as he flashed the red digits on his hands at Wallace.

"I know, I should have just given up," Wallace said. At the water's edge, Shannon's milotic began building a torrent of water by redirecting the flow of the tide into a ring that circled its body. "But she's not going to give up now. Do you think you can move its body with confusion?"

Elgyem turned his arms over and shrugged, the red lights on his hands fading as he blinked the yellow digits. "Elgy?"

Wallace watched the colors on elgyem's hands change, a sign of hope perhaps, that maybe it wasn't a total mistake to try and fight back. "We can at least try. Alright, go for confusion, give it all you've got."

Shannon made a finger gun at toward elgyem and Wallace. Dropping her thumb, Shannon mimicked a firing motion and flipped a lock of her chocolate brown hair. "Boom!"

Milotic's body continued to rise from the bay and the ring of water haloing it maneuvered the length of its body. Like an expert controlling a hula hoop, Milotic worked the torrent of water until it circled its head and fired by jutting its upper body out to the beach. The water pulse fired from the top of milotic's head and cleaved through the lower half of the beach like butter.

"Confusion barrier, elgyem," Wallace said, his nails digging into his palms.

Elgyem raised his arms to the incoming attack and moved them in quick circles, each of his digits flashing as two tall purple walls formed at an angle. Wallace moved in closer behind elgyem and watched as the water pulse struck the walls and split on impact.

"Don't let them rest, Melanie. Follow up with an aqua tail," Shannon commanded.

The milotic swirled through the waters of the bay, its tail sweeping into the water before it came up, a fountain of water trailing behind it. Milotic let out of a sing-song cry as it turned its body over in the bay and its tail came swinging down toward the beach.

Wallace felt the impact in the shifting sands as milotic's tail landed on the beach and a gush of water erupted from under it. The water rose into the air, forming into a small wave that curved and crashed down on elgyem's walls. The attack struck the confusion walls and cracked them on impact. Wallace watched with wide eyes as the walls wavered, their formation shaking until the pressure of the wave became too much and the walls vanished in a blink.

Racing again the water, Wallace snaked his arm across elgyem's body and pulled him to his chest before the first wave hit. Turning to avoid the brunt of the impact, Wallace felt the water crashed upon his legs like waves slam the shore until the beach swept away under his feet and the wave carried him up the beach.

"Let's get another water pulse going, I don't think they've had enough!" Shannon called from the shallows.

When the feeling of waterlogged sand returned under Wallace's feet he rolled himself from the wave and shook water from his hair, uncoiling from over elgyem. Wallace rolled himself out of the wave once he felt the beach under him again and shook water from his hair as he uncoiled around elgyem. "Now's our chance for a confusion," he said as he wiped his face and brushed flecks of sand off his cheeks.

Under him, with the flash of elgyem's green digits, the psychic-type vanished and blinked back into sight hovering above Wallace.

"Wallace, have elgyem focus on milotic's head!" Ben called out.

Wallace tossed a look over his shoulder to find Ben and Carl standing near the tree line, far from the arena where Shannon's massive and flashy attacks wouldn't reach them. "The head?" he asked, looking back to milotic, its next ring of water had formed around its head, churning in its precise formation. "Elgy, did you hear that? Focus on milotic's head."

"El-gy!" he beeped out as he raised his arms and began glowing with the same purple light from his earlier attack.

As milotic's water haloed her neck, her head glowed purple with elgyem's attack and the water-type's eyes pinched shut as it let out a high pained cry.

"Melanie, what's wrong!" Shannon gasped.

"Focus!" Wallace said, clenching his fists in determination.

The light elgyem emitting glowed brighter as he pushed himself through the air, the pained expression on milotic's grew worse and Wallace winced, almost turning away as the water around its neck moved higher toward its head before it exploded. The formation burst apart, covering milotic's head with the gush of water before it rained down over the shallows like cloudburst that had Shannon shrieking and running toward the beach.

Elgyem pushed his arms through the air with great strain, as if pushing an invisible object through the air. "Elgy!" he cried as his light dimmed.

Looking back to milotic, Wallace saw the water from its aborted attack dripping from its head, highlighted by the glow of elgyem's confusion that grew brighter until it too faded and milotic lurched back. An unseen force, a giant palm, seemed to smack milotic and sent it reeling back in the water. Milotic let out a long wail as it sank back into the water and dipped below the surface.

"Yes!" Wallace cheered and jumped in the air, kicking his legs and pumping the air. "We did it, elgy, we did it!" Wallace wrapped elgyem in a hug and spun with him, surprised at how good a victory could feel. "You did so good."

"Uh uh!" Shannon cried. "It's not over! Melanie, give a water pulse everything you've got!"

"What?" Wallace hummed as he stopped spinning and watched the surface of the bay break as Milotic shot into the air, a ring of water orbiting her head. Wasting no time, milotic aimed its upper body at the beach and fired.

Wallace watched, his arms tight over elgyem as the ring of water shot across the beach and slammed into the sand. The water's formation broke apart and flooded the beach as the wave rose and crashed around them sweeping he and elgyem into another wave.

"Aqua tail!"

Wallace pulled elgyem closer to his chest as he heard Shannon's high voice call out another attack, still swirling and tumbling in the wave of the water pulse, trying to orientate himself as his directions swapped, the water turning him upside down. Another impact struck the beach, but rather than carry him toward the forest, Wallace saw the trees receding as he and elgyem drifted out to the bay. He hit something hard as the waves vanished, replaced by the ebb and flow of the bay water that carried him back and forth through the shallows near Shannon.

Above him milotic craned her winding body over him, dripping water onto his face as she observed him and elgyem.

"Give up?" Shannon asked as she came splashing over and crouched beside him in the foamy shore water.

"Sure," Wallace said, his excitement washed clean away.

"Excellent," Shannon said as she grabbed Wallace's arms and helped him stand. "I left your shirt on that rock over there, once you're dry we'll head out and you can tell me _all_ about Iggy," Shannon said, recalling milotic and trotting onto beach to Carl and Ben.

Wallace cast his eyes across the beach to find a lone rock in the sand she'd thrown his shirt on. The rock lied within the bounds of the arena Ben crafted and his shirt was so drenched it looked three times darker than it had that morning.

Carrying a dripping elgyem, Wallace sat beside the rock and laid the shirt out flat on the rock to help it dry. Elgyem made an elated sounding beeping noise and Wallace saw him sticking his wet limbs into the sand and pulling them out coated in the pellets.

"Most would consider that annoying," Wallace smiled as he rubbed his legs, clearing away some of the sand that had gathered on his calfs. "Having sand on them, but not you huh? Are you feeling okay?"

Elgyem waved his arms from side to side, his green digits flashing non-stop as the sand pellets seemed to repulse from his skin and attracted back, using his psychic powers to make a game out of it. "Elgy!"

"That's good, I don't want you to be bummed that we lost," Wallace said as he brought his knees to his chest. "I'm kind of bummed we lost. Do you think we'll get stronger?"

Elgyem shrugged, the yellow digits on his hands flashing only once. "Elgy?" he beeped, his tone low and a little disinterested.

"You probably don't care." Wallace hummed to himself and pulled spinarak's ball out and released the bug-type onto the sand, his team's key looped across his body a couple times.

Spinarak jumped back and forth, eyes searching for any potential prey until he decided the beach was safe and he skittered toward elgyem, they key dragging under him and leaving a line in the sand. From his other pocket Wallace pulled out a rolled bag of food and dumped out a handful on the wrapper for his team.

Wallace pressed into his lip and started to bite absently at the skin on his lips as he watched the bay water calm in the wake of the battle. "Andrew was strong. I remember his first battles, he won them all. He used to camp in the woods for days and battle any wild pokémon that came by just to get stronger. Maybe when we get our totodile from the nurse we'll be stronger," he said as he looked over his shoulder to the forest. "I didn't bring any Poké Balls, but maybe we can befriend something while we're here."

* * *

"Where are we going?" Ben asked from the back of their formation with Wallace.

Shannon's shoulders jumped in her sweater as she shrugged. "Who knows, but then again, no one knows where they're going until they get there. Am I right?"

Erring on the side of being self-conscious, Wallace held his shirt in front of him, letting it wave in the wind to dry it off as quick as possible. "We can either look for other teams or wait for them to find us, I guess."

"True," Shannon said, tossing a look over her shoulder to Carl, a few paces behind her. "You haven't said a word since the beach, what do you think?"

Shannon's question direction to him caused Carl's bark and shoulders jerk, something Wallace caught. Let alone since the beach, but Carl hadn't spared many words since they stepped on the island, but Wallace couldn't tell if it was because he didn't want to be a part of the assignment or was usually quiet.

"Well, we were on the beach for a while so other teams are probably going to be looking for us," Carl said as he cast his eyes on the trees. "We're probably going to have someone find us before we know it."

"Maybe it'll be one of my girls," Shannon said. "Eleanor and Azalea might have gotten the other keys and if we're together they can just hand 'em over and we can claim victory!"

"Why did she decide to help us?" Carl asked, his voice low.

"Hmm? I don't know really. When Professor McCloud brought the idea to us we were the only ones to volunteer and when she gave Eleanor the choice she decided to help, instantly," Shannon said. "Didn't give a reason why, though but when the boys decided to work against you all, I'm glad she choose to help."

Wallace pursed his lips to contain his smile as they walked on. The further from the beach they traveled they veered further from whatever beaten path they'd followed from the beach.

Although Shannon didn't technically look like the outdoorsy type, Wallace followed her without question of her sense of direction. The further into the island they trekked the heavier the canopy grew overhead and the louder the forest sounds became around them. The buzzing of Carl's scizor wings was ever present as its polished red body zipped through the trees.

Ben's gabite had unthawed on the beach, curtesy of a berry from Shannon and the heat from the sun, but it still looked a little miffed at being the target of the mamoswine's attack in the first place. Walking behind the dragon-type, Wallace went on high alert when the gabite stopped walking and stood frozen in its place and started snapping at a break in the trees.

"What's wrong?" Ben asked as he crouched beside his gabite and stared into the trees.

"Gaaabite!" Gabite snapped its jaw at the trees and bared its claws, but didn't move from Ben's side.

"Wallace, something is scaring Angelica," Ben said as he ran his hands down her back. "Her scales are hardening, she's freaked."

"Want me to check it out?" Wallace asked as he looked ahead. Carl and Shannon were blind to whatever had gabite spooked and were heading down whatever path Shannon cut out for them. "Don't let them leave us behind, I'll be back." Wallace threw his shirt on, the damp fabric cold to his skin and he looked to elgyem for reassurance, who nodded, and they approached the trees.

Slipping his hands into a pair of low branches, Wallace opened a gap for himself and slipped through the trees, maneuvering through a row of bushes until he was on the other side of their path. He recoiled back and nearly leaped back through the trees as the clear sound of someone being smacked came from a clearing a few yards ahead of him.

The unforgettable sound of skin slapping skin raised Wallace's flesh into bumps as he strained his eyes, trying to see what lied ahead without moving any closer for fear of being noticed. Past his little break in the trees, through more bushes, Wallace distinguished the shapes of two people standing the low grass of a field on the other side.

Elgyem shifted on Wallace's shoulder, climbing forward to get a better look and emitting curious beeping noises as he floated off Wallace's shoulder and headed for the trees. "Elgy?"

"Elgyem, we have to be quiet," Wallace said, holding a finger to his mouth as he followed elgyem who dared to hover even closer to the field.

Wallace followed elgyem's twitching little tail as he let out a slow beep before he crossed his hands over his mouth. Rolling his eyes every time he stepped on a twig that snapped, Wallace eased through the bushes and kept low until he was on the other side of the opening and pressed himself against a tree, following elgyem's lead who was perched on a branch above his head.

Moving like molasses, Wallace eased around the tree trunk, his head poking out as he took in the scene in the field. There was one girl lying back in the grass, though she didn't look comfortable, more like she had been pushed down. The girl laid back, propped on one arm and the other hand cupped her cheek as she wiped at her eyes. Was she crying?

Movement in the field shifted Wallace's attention to another girl, small in stature, but her presence seemed like that of a giant's as she hovered over the fallen girl. Her hands hung from her hips and her mouth moved a mile a minute, her head bobbing as she spoke to the girl on the ground.

Focusing on the details of the girls, Wallace made our white-blonde hair laced with streaks of an electric blue dye job and instantly recognized the standing girl as Azalea from Andrew's birthday party. Her posture and body language as she stood over the fallen girl caused something in the back corner of Wallace's mind to shift into place and recall a memory. In the diary entires he'd stolen from Arlette there were mentions of another girl who ruined her trip with Andrew to Laverre by calling on his holocaster. Without having to study the clothing of the girl on the ground, Wallace knew she had to be Arlette, the girl unfortunate enough to run into the one person who probably hated her most.

Wallace stained so hard to ear anything she girls might say the weight on elgyem landing on his head nearly sent him rocketing out of his clothes like a Saturday morning cartoon. "What?" he hissed, hand pressed to his chest to still his thudding heart.

"Ge, ge!" Elgyem flashed the green light on his hand in Wallace's face before he slowly raised his arm and pointed to another large tree a few feet away.

It was closer to the field than his current hiding spot and so Wallace wasted no time in hopping over fallen branches and piles of leaves to relocate. Wallace held his thump up to elgyem as he pressed his back to the tree and craned his neck around the trunk, his view of the girls much better and he began to pick up bits of their conversation, or rather Azalea's chiding.

"Did you think I'd forget?" Azalea asked, her voice sharp and grating like a blade on a chalkboard. "I'm not stupid, unlike you. He tells me he's coming back to Kalos, but can't see me yet? And when I call he's not able to talk and some girl picks up instead? I kept quiet about it though, because I knew I would see him at his birthday party and if I saw whoever this mystery girl was there, we'd get a chance to settle things, but you were smart enough to stay away. Then again, I didn't know it was _you_."

Wallace scrunched up his face at the way Azalea spoke, as if it caused her physical pain to interact with Arlette and direct even the harshest words at her.

"But then they arrested you," Azalea paused and laughed, her hands cupping her stomach. "I've never been more upset and happy at the same time. The girl Andrew was seeing behind my back was at the same school as me. Could you imagine if he was still alive, trying to keep his secret up? Or maybe he would have dropped the charade and just picked one of us." Azalea held her hands out to the side and shrugged, a playful jump of her shoulders, though her voice was grave and dark. "When they took you away, you should have stayed away."

Wallace strained to hear Azalea's next word, but instead he heard another slap and the sound of something snapping. Looking back around the tree he saw Azalea standing directly over Arlette, their hands tangling as Arlette batted her away, but Azalea was stronger than she looked. Wallace watched as she grabbed Arlette's wrists and twisted, causing the bigger girl to cry out and go limp until Azalea let go. Wallace narrowed his eyes as he saw Azalea reach to Arlette's chest and pull up her team's key and yank it from her neck, snapping the chain it was on.

"I wish they would have locked you up and never let you out," Azalea said, her voice like audible venom. "He's gone because of you! I wanted you to know that, so I started leaving little notes for you when I learned you were returning to campus. I even blew out your window thinking you get the hint and leave for good. Crawl back the orphanage you slithered out of. I should tell the other students to watch where they step, there are ekans in the grass," Azalea said as she kicked up a bit of dirt and grass in Arlette's face. "Trust no one!"

Wallace turned away from the scene in the field, heat rushing his head and his stomach practically bottoming out as Azalea's voice cracked as she screamed at Arlette, her anger boiling to the surface. Daring another look around the tree, Wallace saw Azalea strutting away from Arlette who had rolled onto her hands and knees and grabbed a Poké Ball from her waist. Wallace knew what she'd send out even before the ball left her hand and to no surprise her garchomp landed in the clearing, towering over Azalea who turned, but seemed unfazed by the dragon's appearance.

"I loved him!" Arlette shrieked as she stumbled to her feet, her arms crossed in front of her, more in a defensive manner than anything else. She rubbed at her eyes and plucked blades of grass from her hair. "What he did to us, what he did, lying to us, it wasn't – it wasn't right."

Wallace felt his eyes pricking with tears as Arlette's voice broke and cracked as she struggled to stand up for herself. From his distance he could actually see her legs wobbling like a new born deerling, struggling to even stand on its own without support.

"I-I loved him and I know you did too, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry we loved him at the same time," Arlette said.

Azalea balled her hands up and threw her hands up and down in the air, the chain for the stolen key glinting in the sunlight. "You. Don't. Know. Anything!" she hollered back before she whipped a ball of her own out. The ball whizzed across the field, smacking Arlette in the leg and nearly sent the girl falling over as it a bullet had struck her. A dazzling light exploded before Arlette and filled the clearing before a dainty sylveon took its place in front of Arlette, its ribbon feelers waving despite there being no wind. "I might not be a training major, but I'm not weak. Don't challenge me, _girl_ , recall your garchomp, or I'll do more than take your key."

Arlette shook her head as she backed away from the sylveon, taking her place beside her garchomp. "Elroy, get ready. Use your hone claws technique," Arlette said as he rubbed garchomp's back. "I-I don't care if it's a fairy, I know you can do this."

Wallace gaped at her, wondering if she'd really fight an uphill battle, but she seemed ready to fight as her garchomp slashed its claws against each other the way a chef readies his knives.

"Hmph!" Azalea grunted as she ran a hand down one of her pigtails. "Cinnamon, you ready?" she asked.

"Sly-ve-on!" Cinnamon, the sylveon, walked in a circle, keeping the garchomp in its sights before it pranced toward Azalea and posed in front of its trainer.

"I'll teach you a lesson," Azalea said. "Cinnamon, fill this field with your misty terrain and take this garchomp down with your dazzling gleam. Consider it a challenge to oneshot this dragon-type."

"Arlette, get out of there!" Wallace hissed under his breath as he watched the sylveon shimmy its body around before its feelers moved rapidly as a thick pink smoke seemed to come from its body.

Like fog dragging itself across the ground, the pink smoke coated the field until the grass was invisible even under Wallace's feet. The smoke then floated to the air, altering the sunlight that baked the field. Slowly, the field was covered in a pink haze and turned the green trees a purple hue. Wallace glared through the mist to see Arlette standing, unbothered, beside her garchomp that didn't seem deterred from fighting despite the stacking odds against it.

"Elroy, go for a dig," Arlette said pointing to the ground and running her finger through the air up to slyveon. "We can still win and get our key back," she said.

Wallace shook his head. "Arlette, let it go," he said as he watched her garchomp tuck his claws into the earth and begin tearing into it. In just a few seconds there seemed to be a large hole in front of Arlette as garchomp started to bury himself into it.

"Cinnamon, go ahead and dazzling gleam that garchomp once it's stuck underground," Azalea said, sounding bored by Arlette's attempt to fight back.

"Arlette!" Wallace rasped, not loud enough for her to actually hear. "Just run, are you stupid?"

As garchomp's thrashing tail vanished into the hole, Azalea's sylveon leaped into action and darted across the ground and hovered by the dig hole. Wallace watched the misty terrain seep into the hole and realized how bad things were going to be before sylveon's entire body glimmered and exploded with light.

Turning his back to the tree, Wallace avoided the brunt of the attack's glaring light as it exploded out from the field. He heard what sounded like the ground shifting before he dared to look back. The space in the field between the two girls looked like a bomb had gone off underground, but hadn't done enough damage to explode outwards. A large lump, a small hill, now stood between the two girls and Wallace paled thinking about the condition of the garchomp after the attack.

Azalea's slyveon jumped into sight and landed on top of the mound, a victory, pretty in pink ribbons, before it bounced down the other side and came to rub against Azalea's legs. From the side of the hill closest to Arlette, Wallace could see pink smoke, what remained from sylveon's misty terrain, wafting up from the original hole in the ground.

"El—Elroy?" Arlette called out between coughs as she fanned the smoke from her faced. "Elroy?!"

"Gone," Azalea said as she checked her nails. "Probably regretting ever listening to you. Go ahead and get in that hole to recall him, I'd love to bury you too," she said as she pointed to the lump in the earth. "I've got your team's only key and taken out the only pokémon you were allowed to use. You should just give up, head back to the island, pack up your shit and leave. There's no room for you here."

Wallace watched, stunned, as Azalea turned and spun Arlette's key around her finger. Her sylveon bounced along after her, innocuous, as if it didn't just take down a fully evolved pokémon. Wallace didn't even think to hide as Azalea came walking past, her blue eyes like saucers as she spotted him and froze on the spot.

"What?" she barked. "Do you want to fight me too?" she asked, her tone a little bit sweeter, though her face didn't convey the same message.

Wallace shook his head and looked up elgyem who had his red lights flashing on high and had his arms crossed over his chest. "N-No, we don't want any trouble," he said.

Azalea's hardened demeanor faded and her bubbly demeanor reappeared. "Good!" she chirped. "Here, you can have this!" she said as she tossed Arlette's key, the green one, at him.

Wallace held the key tightly, its ridged underside digging into his palm. "Aren't you supposed to be helping the teams, Eleanor said so?" he asked as he glanced back into the field, Arlette had fallen to her chest and had her head pressed into the dirt, her back heaving.

"And I just gave you a key, I call that being _very_ helpful," she said with a wink before she flipped her hair and vanished into the trees, her sylveon trouncing at her heels. "Be sure to tell Eleanor I've been a good girl!"

Once Azalea's voice died away within the trees, Wallace turned back to the field. Arlette was sitting up, her chest jumping as she moved beside the lump in the ground. Had there been a stone placed in front of the hill it might have passed for a large and freshly dug grave. Arlette pulled her Poké Ball out before she hunched over and started to sob, her shoulders jerking as she rubbed at her eyes. Wallace kept his distance, listening to Arlette's sobbing cries as clear as day from his spot behind the tree. He only watched her as she crawled around the hill and vanished into the hole, only to crawl back out a few moments later, clipping the ball to her waist. She stood and looked around the field and Wallace pressed his back to the tree, pulling his head out of sight and pinched his eyes shut, hoping he hadn't seen her. Her defeat at Azalea's hands was embarrassing enough without a witness.

What felt like a solid five minutes passed before Wallace dared to look around the tree again to see the field empty, with no trace of Arlette. Aside from the unnatural hill it was impossible to tell what had just gone down in the patch of grass.

"Wallace, help!"

Ben's terrified voice came through the trees and had Wallace pushing off from his hiding spot and leaping back toward his team. Thrashing through the trees and bushes, Wallace stumbled out into the path where Shannon and Carl were standing in front of Garret's team with Johnny and Kit in tow.

Kit was dressed in his typical baggy clothing with his notepad in hand, arms crossed in front of his waist and Garret was at his side, dressed in clashing shades of yellow. Their pokémon, bulbasaur and mareep were standing side by side. Johnny was walking back and forth in front of Shannon, rubbing his eyes as he paced, his boots crunching on twigs with every step.

"Will someone just give me the key please," Johnny sighed as he rubbed a hand over his short cut brown hair, blind to Wallace's arrival on the path.

"Meh." Shannon shrugged before she held her arms out as if she was preparing to be searched by the police. "I told you already, I've got it. But there's no fun in just handing it over, you'll have to frisk me for it."

"You can't be serious? Johnny asked, pausing his pace to stare Shannon up and down.

"What's wrong?" Shannon asked, sounding hurt. "Don't you think I'm pretty?" she tousled her hair and struck a pose for Johnny before she threw her arms out again and turned. "Frisk away!"

Wallace had to contain his laughter at Shannon's antics as he swore he saw Johnny's face grow a shade darker.

"You're – I think you – no, it's not that," Johnny stammered before he cleared his throat and walked to Carl. "Do you have it?"

"Uh."

"It's okay, Carl, you don't have to say it," Shannon cut-in. "He'd tell you the same but Carl's a bit of a lone wolf. He didn't want to, but he gave me the key and you're only getting it one way." Shannon raised her arms above her head and started to do a silly dance in place. "Step right up, search for the treasure you seek."

"Why don't we battle for it?" Garret said.

Wallace was taken about by the tone of Garret's voice, louder more firm than he remembered it to be. He avoided meeting eyes with his former roommate, though he figured the need to battle was aimed at him.

"There's got to be another way," Johnny said. "We lost our first key and just fought to get it back, can't we solve this another way?"

"Oh!" Shannon said as she regained her composure. She stopped twirling and jumped into Johnny's face, prodding him in the chest with a manicured nail. "You didn't mention you had a key of your own. That changes things," she said, running her nail in a circle on his chest. "We'll be taking your key and you're either handing it over or we'll battle for it, whether you want to fight or not."

"Wh-What happened to frisking?" Johnny asked, shuddering back from Shannon.

"Well, you know what they say: you snooze you lose." Shannon turned her finger on each of Johnny's team. "Now, tell me, who's carrying, because you're the one we beat first."

Johnny scoffed before he pulled a chunky blue key from his pocket. "I've got it, but I don't care who has your key because I want to fight you," he said, nodding to Carl. "Your scizor will be a nice challenge."

"Oh?" Carl said before he looked over his shoulder. "Are you ready, Zor?

Carl's scizor stepped up and snapped its pincers in the air. "Sciz!"

"Good," Johnny said as he pulled out a ball and gently tossed it up. "Meet my own scizor, his name's Agrippa." Following the release, Johnny caught the ball as another scizor appeared in the path. Unlike Carl's, Johnny's scizor didn't rest beside its trainer, instead it buzzed around in the air above the path with all the energy and excitement of a kid in a candy store.

"Ooh, looks like we're going to be szicorring out here," Shannon said. "Go ahead and start whenever boys!" Shannon said as she playfully waved at Johnny and Carl.

"Bullet punch!" Johnny and Carl yelled in concert.

The bug and steel-type's lunged at each other, their dominant pincers outstretched as they collided in mid-air above their trainers. The sound of metal clanging against itself rang through the forest and made Wallace cringe. The resonating sound of their attack's colliding buzzed in Wallace's ear as the two scizor maintain their form for a breath. Carl's scizor, Zor, pulled back and gave bullet punch another try, only to be countered again by Agrippa, their metallic red pincers making a loud bonging sound as their weapons ground against each other.

Zor's leg bent and jabbed upward, landing a blow in the lined black section of Agrippa's abdomen, but Johnny's scizor didn't seem to care. Instead, it pulled its pincers back and raised them overhead. Agrippa let out a loud battle cry as it brought its joined claws down, slamming them against the crown of Zor's head.

Zor dropped in the air, but recovered and swooped over, buzzing back up to Agrippa and made another jab at it, its pincer glinting as it punched the air. Agrippa swerved to dodge the follow-up bullet punch and kicked at Zor, who blocked with its claw. The two scizor fought like that for a while, each attacking and blocking and neither seeming to do much damage as neither trainer bothered to call out a new command.

During another one of Zor's attempts to land a blow, Agrippa turned its pincer sideways and clamped down on Zor's mandible, locking the two together before Agrippa spun and released Zor, sending Carl's scizor hurtling toward the ground.

"Swords dance!" Johnny said.

In the time it took Zor to recover, Agrippa rose high into the sky and banged its pincers together several times, the sound getting louder each time. Wallace narrowed his eyes at the scizor, searching for a physical change, but the only one he spotted was a long glint of light that shone over its armor as if a spotlight passed over it.

"Let's go for that trick. Use bullet punch and follow it with a u-turn!" Johnny said waving his hand at Carl and Zor.

"Sciz!" Agrippa grunted before it aimed its claw at Zor and lunged down toward it.

"Zor, stay away from it!"

Agrippa ripped through the air like a rocket before it struck the ground, the impact shaking Wallace slightly, but Carl's scizor zipped back out of range. Agrippa pulled back from the ground and flew back into the sky, only to fly over and make a beeline back for Zor, striking at the ground in front of it again. Agrippa continued the same tactic, striking and retreating, only to double back and strike again, each time forcing Zor further and further away from Carl until the two pokémon were isolated from the trainers.

"Zor, go for an x-scissor," Carl said.

"Break through that," Johnny said cooly. "Bullet punch."

Zor crossed its arms, but before they were locked into place Agrippa delivered a dead-on punch to Zor's chest that caused its arms to break formation and leave Zor open for another attack.

"Iron head, Zor!" Carl shouted.

Wallace's eyes widened as he watched a glint of light strike Zor's head, the spokes on the top of its head glowing as Agrippa's claw did the same as the two attacked together. Their metal exoskeletons clashed and sent a blaring clanging sound rippling through the forest, but neither pokémon budged from their spots, each straining to overpower the other.

"Agrippa, hold steady and use swords dance again," Johnny said.

"Can he do that?" Wallace whispered to Ben.

Ben nodded, his eyes fixed on the two pokémon. "If his scizor is coordinated enough, it's possible to maintain two attacks at once."

Agrippa held its stance, fighting back against Zor's iron head and with its free pincer it smacked the pincer pressed to Zor's head.

"Push through!" Johnny snapped.

"Zor, protect against it," Carl said.

Zor leaped back and tucked its body in, its arms crossing over its chest as Agrippa pulled back and punched. The blow landed and it sent Zor flying back through the forest and crashing into a small tree, snapping it in half. A line of dirt and dust rose in Zor's wake, but Carl didn't seem worried.

"I know you're okay, so go for an x-scissor, Zor," Carl said.

A red glint of Carl's scizor emerged from the debris of the fallen tree and it looked unharmed by the bullet punch, though Wallace was beginning to wonder how much the same species would be able to deal to each other. But if Johnny kept powering up his scizor their types and species wouldn't matter anymore.

"Big mistake not going for priority," Johnny said. "Because now I have time for this: Agrippa, another swords dance and then let's use our trump card."

Zor crossed its arms and took off, darting across the ground at Agrippa. Halfway to its target, Zor's arms glowed white and blue before it leaped off the ground and flew the rest of the way, zeroing in on its target.

Agrippa kept its ground and readied itself as it clanged its pincers together again and when it was done it opened itself up for an attack when Johnny brought an arm in front of his chest and touched on something around his wrist.

A glint shone from Agrippa's neck that grew until the pokémon was covered in a sphere of light. Carl's scizor paused its attack and stood protectively in front of his trainer as the light grew. Wallace shielded his eyes, but peered through his fingers, eager to see what kind of trump card Johnny had, but wasn't prepared for what Agrippa looked like when the light faded.

Agrippa's rounded edges had become more defined and mechanical looking. Its pincers had grown and taken on jagged indentations like large knives. The sunlight that was able to break through the canopy glinted off new plates of armor black as pitch that adorned Agrippa's body.

"What is that?" Wallace gasped.

"You've never seen a mega evolution before?" Ben asked as he rubbed the top of his gabite's head. "I hope Angelica might mega evolve one day."

Wallace's eyes grew wide at the scizor's new body. Mega evolution, the one aspect of trainer life his father hadn't yet broken into as only select individuals possessed the ability for such a technique, there was no profitability in mega evolution.

"Impressive, isn't it?" Johnny said as he admired his scizor with wide eyes. "Agrippa, show them what you can do. Bullet punch!"

Carl jolted in his spot, seemingly lost in observing Agrippa. "Z-Zor, protect!"

Zor curled up again, but it didn't stay tucked in, instead it stood still as Agrippa charged it. Carl let out a small yell before he dove out of the way as Agrippa struck Zor. The blow was the loudest of their battle and Wallace saw how smart Carl was to move as Zor was forced back across the ground and crumbled under the blow, its back digging into the ground as Agrippa pressed on, dragging Zor through the earth before it hovered overhead and began punching, non-stop, into the scizor's open body.

"Keep going, Agrippa, don't let up," Johnny said.

Wallace turned from the fight, but couldn't escape the sounds of Agrippa the pile driver pummeling Zor into the dirt. From the corner of his eye he saw Carl reaching for his Poké Ball before he fired it out. After a few moments the sound of Agrippa's punches stopped and Wallace glanced out over the path again. Agrippa was standing proudly over a hole and trench in the ground, victorious.

"Congrats," Carl said solemnly.

Johnny walked to Agrippa's side and rubbed along his pokémon's armor. "Thanks, you fought well. I guess we'll be taking your key now," he said, glancing nervously to Shannon.

"I don't have it," she said with a wink. "But I bet you wish I did."

Wallace took a deep breath before he opened his hand and showed the key Azalea had given him, deciding to keep the key spinarak was holding a secret. "Here, it's the one McCloud gave us," he said, holding it toward Johnny, but eyeing Garret who hadn't moved from beside Kit.

"Thanks man," Johnny said as he claimed the key and slipped it into his pocket with his blue key. "Wish us luck," he said as he turned and headed back toward his team.

Once the other team was out of sight Shannon stomped her foot and snapped her fingers. "Dang, I didn't want them to win. Now we have to start from the beginning."

"Not quite," Wallace said.

"That key wasn't ours," Ben said softly. "McCloud gave us a red key."

"Yeah, I got the green key when I went off through the trees," Wallace said. "Azalea gave it to me. So we lost that, but we've still got our original key and if Johnny's team has two keys that means there's only one more team out there with a key, Neo's team."

"We're still in this?" Shannon asked, her eyes shining as she clasped her hands to her chest.

"We're still in this," Wallace said. "If we come across Johnny's team again we already know what they'll use. Scizor, mareep, or a bulbasaur. I can beat Kit and Ben you can probably take Garret, Shannon can maybe fight Johnny if we need to. So the only threat is Neo's team, we can still win," Wallace said, feeling a point of hope and happiness swelling inside.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty-Two

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ I actually ended up writing two chapters, 23 right after 22, and the next chapter will be coming out in just a few hours, so yay, a double feature chapter update!

 **Question of the Chapter #21:** Out of Wallace and Arlette, who do you think is feeling the aftereffects of Andrew's death worse?


	23. New Normal

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter** **Twenty-** **T** **hree** **–** **New Normal**

 _Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys. – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

After following Shannon for a majority their first day on the island, Team Safari camped near a lake that looked somewhat undisturbed by other teams and set up for a night in the safari that passed, thankfully, without event. The team woke to the sunrise the following morning to find an eevee with its head stuck in one of their food bags, caught in the midst of stealing. But rather than chasing it off, Ben was quick to catch it and spent the morning cuddling it.

While walking in circles around their camp they searched for other teams and developed plans on how to process before setting up camp again to eat. After their lunch, the team drifted to the far side of the lake and found a plot of sand to relax on.

"Nooo, stop," Ben whined as his new eevee, Nightfang, scampered toward a bag of food Wallace had laid out as a test. Ben scooped up the eevee and rubbed his face against its fur. "We're friends now, you don't have to steal."

"Eeee," it cried as it tried to wiggle free from Ben and make its way to the food.

"Isn't it cute, Wallace?" Ben asked as he thrust the eevee at Wallace. "I'm going to give it so much love and attention and it'll evolve in no time."

Wallace scooted back on the sand, away from the wide-eyed brown and cream colored pokémon as playfully swiped at his face. "Adorable," he said dryly, never much getting the hype over eevee and its evolutions.

"I've used almost all of my Poké Balls and didn't catch anything," Shannon said as she stood up from the shore. "I'm going to go search for more things to catch on my way back to camp. You boys coming?"

"Sure," Carl said from his spot far from the water.

"Yup!" Ben said as he curled an arm around his eevee, who was still adamant about that bag of food, and stood up. "Wallace?"

"I'll catch up," he said as he waved them off. He tossed a look over his shoulder as they vanished into the trees before he stared ahead at the lake and watched the waters ripple due to activity happening under the surface. Glancing at the sky, Wallace figured their time in the islands had to be coming to an end. The sun, while it hung low in the distance and was still hours from setting, rippled its light through the clouds in waves of pastel pinks, blues, and purples. "Long day, huh, elgyem?" Wallace asked to the pokémon stacking stones in the sand.

Elgyem blinked the lights on his hands and hummed in agreement, but quickly went back to using his psychic powers to delicately place stones on top of each other.

As Wallace rested back against a rock that stuck out of the sand a few yards up from the water's edge, he looked at the bag sitting beside him. McCloud had made rounds last night and handed out supply bags. The Poké Balls inside were untouched, but he'd gone through most of the food, giving what eevee hadn't eaten to elgyem and spinarak.

A rustling in the bushes on the adjacent side of the lake didn't phase Wallace, a night in the safari having washed away all of his reluctance about being there. "Elgyem?"

Elgyem turned his attention away from stacking stones to take note of the rustling, but rather than a pokémon, long legs, a torso, and a snapback emerged from the bushes. "Oh, hey, Wallace," Ignatius said as he stood at the edge of the bank overlooking the water, shoes in hand.

"What are you doing?" Wallace asked though it was a stupid question judging by the red trunks around Ignatius's hips.

"Going for a swim," Ignatius said cooly as he dropped his shoes to the side.

"But there's pokémon in there. What if they attack you?" Wallace said with a glance to the water. As if to make his point a suspicious gurgle of bubbles broke the surface. While the lake wasn't very big there was no telling how deep it was and if it led out to the bay.

Ignatius laughed as he dropped to the ground and dangled his legs over the water. "I think I can handle some magikarp," Ignatius said as he scooped up a handful of rocks and skipped them over the water. "Swim with me," he said as he dumped the rest of his rocks and kicked his legs.

"I don't know." Wallace looked to the water again. Despite the surface looking calm, and Shannon fishing up nothing dangerous looking, he didn't quite trust the idea of diving in.

"C'mon, Wallace, show me your breaststroke," Ignatius said as he started to mock swim, his arms cutting through the air.

Wallace eyes locked onto an odd marking on Ignatius's otherwise normal and flat chest, a brown spot that looked like a wide squiggle was marked on the right side of his chest.

Ignatius grinned as he looked down to the mark and rubbed it with his finger. "Kind of looks like a kelpsy berry, right?"

"Uh, sure." Wallace tore his eyes away but watched as Ignatius dropped that only came up to his knees until he started wading out toward the middle, going slower as it came up past his waist. He watched as a small lake lapped the shore as dove forward and vanished out into the lake with a furious kick of his feet.

Taking the opportunity of Ignatius being underwater, Wallace stripped off his clothes, folded everything up, and stashed it in the shadow of the rock before he grabbed elgyem up and walked to the water's edge.

The island's lake was surprisingly warm and as Wallace submerged himself the water pricked at his eyes and drew tears that melded into the crystal blue water around him. The island's dry scenery had been a sight, lush forests and small ridges where pokémon romped and played freely, but the view under the water far surpassed it.

The lake dropped in tiers of ledges under the water to the lowest level where crusts of reef and coral formations were stationed in a multitude of colors. Wallace furiously kicked and cut through the water with one arm, while the other held elgyem to his chest. As he swam deeper, Wallace could see the coral formations on the ledges were moving in an odd pattern, and the closer he got he saw that they were alive. Small pokémon with bodies that mimicked the appearance of coral formations, in colors of pink and blue, danced along the ledges in a line.

Other pokémon swam through the open water between the ledges, all different types Wallace had never seen before. One, with spikes protruding from its body puffed up to several sizes larger at the size of Wallace and with a burst of bubbles, jetted away from him and elgyem. Red pokémon with hard looking shells snapped their angry pincers at Ignatius as he kicked around above them.

After just a little while under the surface elgyem began blinking the red digit on his hands at Wallace and he started to rise. Wallace broke the surface and rubbed at his face, wiping away water from his eyes. Through his blurry eyes, he blinked at the shore he'd entered the bay from to find a body standing there on the sand. "Neo?" he asked, his voice harsh when he realized Neo wasn't just standing there, he had his clothes in his hands.

"You're very predictable," Neo said as he dropped Wallace's shirt and shoes on the sand, but kept his shorts before he started digging through the pockets and pulled out spinarak's ball.

"What do you think you're doing?" Wallace barked as she started swimming toward the surface, but was stopped by a pair of arms wrapping around him. "What?!" Thrashing, Wallace craned around to see Ignatius had a hold of him and wasn't letting go.

"Sorry," Ignatius said, his face downturned and the look of guilt fresh on his features.

"My team didn't stray far from the beach when we got our key. I saw you give your spinarak yours to hold," Neo said as he looked over spinarak's ball. "I'll be taking it now." Neo dropped tapped the ball's lock and dropped it onto the sand. A burst of light filled the shore before spinarak emerged, eager and zipping around the sand as usual. "Now, where's the key?"

"Spinarak, string shot him!"

"Hold on!" Neo gasped, but it was too late.

Spinarak leaped around and fired at Neo, a thick line of string striking the boy's glasses and attaching them to his hair and face.

"Elgyem, get him off!" Wallace snapped, growing angry.

Elgyem climbed up to Wallace's head and raised his arms at Ignatius, a flare of purple light haloing him before Wallace felt the boy's arms vanish from around him and his body go whooshing through the water. "Elgy, can you get my stuff?" he asked as he swam forward, the weight from his head vanishing as elgyem teleported to the beach and began to collect Wallace's clothes as well as spinarak, levitating it all into the air.

Wallace staggered onto the beach, avoiding a squirming Neo who was trying to tear the string from his face. "I can't believe you tried to trick me," Wallace said to the water as Ignatius surfaced.

"It was his idea!" Ignatius barked back, splashing water forward as he gestured to Neo.

Wallace grimaced and considered kicking Neo, or tossing sand at him, but both seemed juvenile. "You hate me that much?"

"It's part of the assignment!" Neo snapped as he tore his glasses from his face, his skin red where he ripped the string away. "McCloud said to get the keys however we want!"

"So you resort to stealing?" Wallace asked as he brushed water from his eyes. "I hope this worked out like you planned because I don't even have the key. It's at my team's camp."

Neo's pained expression turned into a sly smile. "I planned for that. There are three people on my team, remember? Calvin is in your camp right now."

Wallace resisted the urge to sprint back to camp. Calvin was only one guy, he couldn't beat Shannon, Ben, and Carl, though he couldn't be sure Shannon wouldn't just hand the key to him if she thought he was cute enough. "They can handle themselves," he said, forcing himself to believe that. "But your team, knowing you there's no way you've let anyone else hold your key," he said as he looked down to Neo and crouched beside him. "Boys, let's search him for his key."

Elgyem lowered to the beach and brought spinarak with him and the two climbed over Neo. Elgyem sat on Neo's chest, his hands out as he held the boy down while spinarak roamed Neo's body.

"Wallace, Wallace, stop! This – this feels weird, get him off me!" Neo yelled as he struggled under elgyem. "Ignis, help me!"

Out in the lake Ignatius sunk down in the water, shaking his head. Wallace watched spinarak burrow under Neo's shirt and come out his arm hole before he vanished into a pocket and came back out to search the others. When he made his way to Neo's collar a small yellow tuft appeared under the fabric and opposed spinarak, Neo's joltik.

"I've got my own bug, forget that, Wallace?" Neo asked, still trying to break from elgyem's control. "How about you let me go, you're cheating anyway, using more than one pokémon."

"McCloud said to get the keys however we want," Wallace said, mimicking Neo. "Spinarak, you can take him," Wallace said as he moved closer to watch the two bug-types squaring off on Neo's chest, even elgyem seemed interested in the tiny battle.

"You can have the key, just get them off me!" Neo yelled, his face growing redder as he fought harder against elgyem.

"Promise?" Wallace asked. "Cause I know a little bit about joltik," Wallace said as he eyed Neo's tablet. "It doesn't have any electricity of its own and it needs to absorb it and I don't think you want it sucking off energy from your tablet. Or maybe you do and maybe I just remove it," he said as he grabbed Neo's arm, rigid from elgyem's control, and began fiddling with the straps.

"No!" Neo gasped, full of breath and high pitched. "You can have the key, I don't care! Leave my tablet alone!"

"You're willing to give up the assignment so easily?" Wallace asked before he started undoing the strap again. "That I don't believe, this must be a trick, let me just take this..."

"Wallace, stop!" Neo demanded, his voice deep and more serious. "I'm not kidding, don't take my tablet. I care about that more than I do this stupid assignment that's got me out here with no electricity and no outlet and no charger!"

"Where's the key?" he asked as he slowly fastened Neo's tablet back to his wrist and then scooped up spinarak. "I won't let elgyem let go of you until you give it to me."

"I'm not just going to hand it over, you have to earn it," Neo said, his eyes focused on Wallace.

"That's it, I'm taking the tablet and kicking it into the lake," Wallace said as spinarak climbed his shoulder and he went back to the tablet.

"No! What I want you to do is apologize to Garret!" Neo said quickly.

Wallace froze and locked eyes with Neo. "What?"

"I don't know everything that happened, but apparently another team stole the keys Garret's team had last night," Neo said as he dropped his head to the sand, his chest heaving. "He and Kit have been hanging with us all morning. Garret misses you, I can tell. Wallace, he said he was going to buy a blow-up mattress to sleep on my floor, but he didn't have any money for it so I had to give him half my blankets and a pillow and he made a little bed on the floor. It's – it's sad to see. He and Kit are not far from there, head in the direction Ignis came from, you'll find them. Apology, and you can have the key. I know you want to."

"Elgyem, let's go," Wallace said as he stood and held his clothes to his chest.

Elgyem waved his hands in front of Neo's face, the red lights flashing as a warning before he floated away from the boy. Wallace slipped his shorts and shirt on as he walked the edge of the lake and found the bushes Ignatius had emerged from. There was a line in the grass away from the lake he guessed would lead him back. Tossing a look over his shoulder he saw Ignatius swimming to the shore and Neo slowly getting to his feet.

Without a thought that he might be walking into a trap, he set off down the line in the grass. Aside from the ring of tall bushes around the lake the area beyond it was sparse, just a few trees and shrubs among the open grass for several yards before Wallace came to a line of trees and more tamped down grass.

As he passed some of the trees a figure moving in his periphery startled him and he nearly threw a punch before he realized it was just Kit slinking along the shadows. The mute boy flinched back from Wallace's raised fists but didn't run.

"Sorry Kit," Wallace said. "I was looking for your camp, for Garret."

Kit nodded and bobbed his head East. Wallace followed a few paces behind Kit as his bulbasaur bobbed out of the tall grass and trailed between them, grunting its own name every couple of steps. The walk to the camp took just a few minutes before they arrived a dirt square filled with the same supply bags McCloud have given his team and makeshift beds made of extra clothing.

Kit pointed to a pile of yellow jackets that Wallace knew had to be Garret's bed and the idea that he was sleeping on a similar thing in Neo's room was a blow to Wallace's gut. "Mind if I stay and wait for him?" he asked as he took a seat in the dirt beside Garret's bed.

Kit shook his head as he eased down close, but a careful distance away from Wallace and pulled out his notepad and a pen. As he scribbled something down, Wallace was reminded of their conversation in the stadium just a week ago before Chara turned up.

Why are you looking for Garret? Kit asked via his notebook in his impeccable handwriting that made Wallace a little envious. At his father's request he took penmanship lessons as a child, but somewhere along the line it became about writing poorly just to piss his father off and he started rejecting the lessons.

"I need to apologize for being, for being me I guess," he said with a sigh.

Kit nodded as he bulbasaur came over and plopped down in his lap. Kit rubbed his pokémon's bulb as he wrote his reply. Who are you?

Wallace tensed up and made an awkward full faced closed lip smile. "Wrong question, Kit. I just mean I was being mean and not thinking about what I said to people and hurt his feelings and actually physically hurt him. I haven't apologized yet and I guess this is as good a time as any."

Kit placed his hands flat on bulbasaur's back and turned to face Wallace, his eyes wide and full of judgment. Even without saying anything, Wallace felt Kit could sense he wasn't telling the whole truth, the feeling was unnerving like staring into a dark cave and not knowing if something is staring back.

Wallace cleared his throat and broke eye contact with Kit and started messing with elgyem's hands, tapping his colored digits. "So what's your deal, why don't you talk? Have I asked you that yet?"

Kit's eyes twitched before he started writing. You asked me that before. It's just easier for me like this.

"But why?" Wallace pressed as he switched from fiddling with elgyem to pulling up a few blades of grass in the dirt.

I don't speak like you. Kit wrote before he put the pad in his lap and starting writing again, furiously. My voice is different, it's an impediment and it's hard to talk to people. People don't try to understand things that are different, they just want to make fun of it. Hyacinth understands me and I can speak, it's just... easier like this. I'm comfortable like this.

Wallace felt a bit of guilt brewing inside as he read over Kit's words and the phrase he seemed to like using, that writing was easier for him. "Whatever makes you comfortable," he said and smiled.

Why were you mean to Garret? What's your deal? Kit wrote, throwing Wallace's words back at him.

Wallace read the line a few times, letting the words sink in until he asked himself that. What was his deal? "You seem nice, Kit, so I don't know if you know what it feels like to not be a good person. Maybe you read a book or watch a movie and there are the hero and the villain, and maybe there are people that stand with them, but the world isn't like that," he said. "There are a hero and a villain, but there are people between all that. People that can never be heroes and aren't enough to be called a villain, but they're still bad. Either what they do is bad, or maybe they're just not good enough to be a hero. I feel like that."

Kit blinked before he started writing, his eyes never straying from Wallace's face. If there are people who are bad, but not bad enough, then there should be people who are just shy of being heroes.

"Maybe," Wallace said reading Kit's response. "But that's my deal, my thing. That's why I'm here," he said, gesturing to the ground around him. "I used to live somewhere else, somewhere nice, and I had everything you could ever want." Elgyem crawled off Wallace's lap as he brought his knees to his chest and stared at the passing clouds. "Kit, imagine a magic glass box and you can reach inside and pull out anything you want. And it was made just for you and you've had it since birth and no one can take it from you. I had that. And one day I pushed it down a flight of stairs and it shattered into a million pieces. And now it's broken beyond repair."

Wallace turned his attention to Kit who was still staring at him with his wide eyes. Wallace pulled the corner of his lips up into a small depreciating smile before he looked to the ground again. "And so, when you have it all and lose it, things change. You move, meet new people, and you become someone else, someone who has to survive without their magic glass box. And when you've lived your life like I have, you don't always know what to do, so you make mistakes and you use people and you treat them like they could be your new glass box. I don't think I realized what a true friend looks like. I had a friend before, but it was out of convenience, we grew up together and kind of grew as people, but I never had someone to face the bad parts of life with and Garret tried to be that, but I pushed him away because I didn't know what friendship felt like." Wallace trailed off, his voice growing hoarse. "But that's enough about my sad life," he said and forced out a laugh. "Thanks for listening," he said, but when he looked at Kit, Kit wasn't looking back, instead the boy's eyes were focused above Wallace's head.

Touching a hand to his shoulder, Wallace felt spinarak there and wasn't sure what Kit was staring at until he craned his neck around and found Garret standing a few feet away, his lips curled into an almost unnoticeable smile. "Oh," Wallace said, his cheeks burning. "Garret, I – I didn't know you were there," Wallace said as he struggled to his feet. "I was looking for you, and I –"

"I forgive you," Garret said softly. "You didn't actually say it, but that was probably the best apology I could have asked for.

"Very nice," Neo said as he slid out from behind a tree, a yellow key spinning around his finger. "A promise is a promise," he said as he stepped up before Wallace and held the key out.

Wallace took it slowly and nodded. "Thanks."

"I'm sorry I only have one to give you," Neo said. "Calvin and Ignis got distracted catching pokémon the first day and we weren't able to get any others until we found your camp. I had Ignis tell Calvin to leave your team alone too."

Wallace bit his lip as he looked at the key in his palm painted a dull yellow. "If I have yellow and blue then red and green are still out there, but Arlette's team lost their key and neither of you has yours."

"I know, maybe the upper-class boy's team has the rest, though they can't technically claim victory in this assignment," Neo said as he tapped his tablet. "Ten percent battery. Wallace, get those other keys and win, I need to reconnect to the world."

Wallace squeezed the key before he gave it to spinarak and recalled him. "Elgy, let's go," he said and elgyem beeped happily as he floated to Wallace's shoulder. "I'll see you guys later, Garret, see you at home," he said with a wide smile before he darted off back into the clearing and toward the lake.

Wallace bounded through the high grass, despite his legs feeling heavy and clumsy in weeds, the warm feeling of mending fences with his first friends on campus had him practically skipping back to camp if it just meant getting off the island and back to school and back to his new normal.

Rather than run to the lake, Wallace kept the water in sight as he ran parallel to it. Ahead the trees were thinning and the afternoon sky was bright blue, nearly cloudless, and then he saw the trees vanish completely as his camp came into sight and then saw Shannon's brown curls. She was standing around with Ben and Carl, but they were facing away from each other, something was wrong. Wallace slowed just outside the camp when he something caused the hair on the back of his neck to prickle, someone was behind him.

With a muted gasp, he pivoted. Simone was waiting behind him with a large pokémon that had a collar of fire around its neck. "Welcome back," she said. "Keep walking."

As if Simone was holding a gun, Wallace raised his hands and walked slowly into the clearing where he joined his team who were under the watch of Arlette, Persia, and their pokémon.

"Simone, what are you doing, you guys lost your key, you should be out of the game," Wallace said.

"Where's the rule book that says that's the case?" Persia asked as she crossed her arms. "We did lose our only key," she said, casting a look to Arlette who shrank under the glare. "But that only made winning that much harder and more fun! The key to success is a challenge."

"We worked those other teams over and got these," Simone pulled two keys from her pockets, the blue and green keys. "Now we're here to get red and yellow and claim victory, so hand 'em over."

"What makes you think we have them?" Wallace said, his voice breaking. "The upperclass team is out there too."

Simone's eyes narrowed before she looked to Ben. "Oh really?"

"I already told her we had a key," Ben admitted, his eyes on the ground.

"I know the upperclassmen don't have anything, they've been wandering around with Eleanor and Azalea all day. I wasn't far when I heard Neo offer you his key, so I decided to have my team wait for your return," Simone said. "Let's have them. Unless you think you can beat Typhlosion."

"We didn't crawl up from the depths of defeat to fall back so quickly!" Persia announced as she swung her arm out to her pokémon, a chesnaught, and ran her fingers through a fringe of fur under his chin.

"Che-che-che-che," the chesnaught cooed as its eyes closed and it leaned into Persia's hand.

From the corner of his eye, Wallace saw Arlette's garchomp standing by her side, seemingly all healed from its fight with Azalea's sylveon yesterday.

"We can take them," Shannon announced as she pulled out a ball and chucked it near Simone.

The girl and her typhlosion backed up as Shannon's milotic emerged in their camp, the largest of the present pokémon and announced her arrival with a wailing cry.

"Wash her away with an aqua tail!" Shannon called out.

Wallace backed away as milotic made a sweeping motion with her tail, a gurgle of water following the scaled limb as it arched into the sky and came down over Simone and her typhlosion.

"Spike, get in there and use your shield!" Persia said, punching the air rapidly.

Her chesnaught dove forward and rolled across the ground past Wallace and Shannon before he unfurled before Simone. "Chuh!" Chesnaught slammed its fists together before it laced its fingers and glint of green light sparked around it that quickly spread into a sphere of light that coated it.

Wallace watched milotic's tail come slamming down onto the shield and in reaction to it several long spikes protruded from the shield, piercing into milotic's tail and caused milotic to cry out as she pulled back.

"I'll teach you that when it comes to me, my pokémon's type doesn't always mean your attack is going to land you a victory!" Simone said, her fists clenched in front of her a fire burning in her eyes. "Typhlosion, up!"

The half-ring of fire around Typhlosion's neck seemed to burn brighter as it charged toward the chesnaught whose shield had faded. Typhlosion dropped to all fours before it reached chesnaught and leaped up onto the pokémon's back before it launched into the air, flying above the recoiled milotic.

Simone brought a fist into the air that came smashing down into her palm. "Thunderpunch!"

Wallace felt himself inching further away as Typhlosion straightened out over milotic and pulled back its fist. Although it was distant from him, Wallace could hear the crackling intensity of Typhlosion's attack before it landed on milotic, connecting with its charged fist.

The ground under milotic exploded, sending a dirt cloud flying out around the camp while streaks of electricity darts across milotic's body and the tender pokémon cried out, helplessly as its long body fell.

"It doesn't look like it wants to give up yet, go for another thunderpunch!" Simone said, grinding her fist into her palm.

"Spikeeee! Needle arm to finish her off, we need those keys!" Persia called out, cupping her mouth.

"Melanie, no!" Shannon gasped.

Wallace watched in horror as the two starter evolutions charged the fallen milotic who was struggling to even get upright. Typhlosion's fist became cloaked in another ball of electric power before it struck in tandem with chesnaught whose arms were covered in a vibrant green light. Chesnaught reached milotic first, striking as many consecutive blows as it could before Typhlosion reached the target.

Like old teammates with precise timing, chesnaught rolled away in time for Typhlosion to land on milotic's body and deliver a fierce that looked like it finished off the water-type.

"You jerks!" Shannon snapped as she fired her Poké Ball's beam at milotic and recalled it. "You didn't have to gang up on me like that!" Shannon brought the ball to her chest and nuzzled her face against it. "My poor baby."

"Who's next?" Simone asked as she rejoined her typhlosion and shrugged her shoulders.

"Carl, do you, do you think if we work together we can take on the chesnaught?" Ben asked as he rubbed the top of his gabite's head?"

"I don't want to work with you," Carl said as he looked at a ball in his hand. "Scizor is still resting from before, but I can do this alone."

"Rethink that," Simone said, her voice clear. "A bug and steel type pokémon won't last again my champion typhlosion. If it's still weakened from an earlier battle then there's no point in putting your pokémon in harm's way. Victory is important, but only if your team can achieve it without taking unnecessary damage."

Wallace cocked a brow up at Simone and her wise choice of words considering she just demolished Shannon without batting an eye.

"Ben, you won't fight me. So, Wallace, it looks like you're all that's left to defend your keys," Simone said. "Feel up to the challenge?"

Wallace took in a slow deep breath and rolled his neck before he shook his head. He knew there was no way spinarak could stand up to the typhlosion and elgyem didn't have any advantage over it either. His only move would be using teleport if he found the chance. "Take 'em," he said as he dug Neo's key from his pocket and held it out.

Ben came walking over with their last key and dropped it into Wallace's hand before Simone snatched them both up and held the entire set aloft. "Victory is sweet," she said as she kissed the keys. "Persia, come hold these for me."

"As you wish!" Persia said, giddy, as she skipped over and claimed the four keys and admired them with wide eyes. "Look, Spike, we won!"

"Che!" Chesnaught beat the ground with his fists and jumped up and down, sharing in his trainer's excitement.

"Victory isn't achieved until you make it to the box in the center of the island," a voice from the trees said, announcing the arrival of another team. From a break in the trees Cole, Kolton, and Travis emerged into the campsite. "Hello ladies," Travis said as he stepped up first, an elegant-looking froslass by his side.

"Oh yeah? Are you going to prevent us from reaching the box?" Simone asked, every word that came from her mouth a challenge in the making.

"We might," Kolton said as he fingered back a strand of his fire red hair.

"What's in it for you, not like you can win this thing?" Simone asked.

"Meh, maybe we just want to keep things interesting," Cole said as he gave a very animated shrug.

"Persia, hold onto those keys like your life depended on it," Simone said. "I'm about to melt these boys."

"Hold up," Cole said, his palm out to Simone, but his eyes were fixed on Persia. "Persia? Persia Swift? Percy?"

"Um, yes?" Persia said, clutching the keys to her chest, her blue eyes wide and blinking every second. "Do I know you?"

Cole's face spread into a wide smile before he dipped his head and laughed. "We grew up together, kind of. Don't you remember me? Cole, from Couriway Town? We used to play by the waterfall and play on the tracks."

Wallace watched, with skeptical eyes shifting between Persia and Cole, as the former looked the boy up and down, her eyes impossibly wider as the look of realization took over. "Cole!" she screeched and dipped across the campsite and into his waiting arms.

Cole leaned back and pulled the small girl off the ground, spinning her around as they embraced. The two of them shared a moment of hushed talking and laughing before Cole set her down and Persia stood before him, gazing up at him with her mouth agape.

"Oooh, senpai notice me," Shannon scoffed before she stuck her tongue out and made it look like she might gag. "Get a room."

"It's so good to see you!" Persia said shrilly, unable to stop smiling.

"Really good seeing you too," Cole said, his eyes low and his smile as charming as Travis's. "But I need these," he said as he plucked the set of keys from Persia's hands.

"Wh-What?" Persia drawled, blinking as her now empty hands, slow on the draw.

"Ha!" Shannon choked out, cupping her mouth for the added volume she didn't really need. "You just got played welcome to the game!"

"Sorry babe," Travis said, winking and clicking his tongue at Persia who looked like she still hadn't registered what Cole had done.

Cole held the keys up and grinned like a madman. "King of the island, that's me. Now I think I'll turn these over to McCloud so that none of you win."

From the corner of his eye, Wallace saw someone rush forward, Ben, and head straight for Cole. In a swift motion, Ben ran past Cole and snatched the keys so fast he nearly pulled Cole with him, the senior boy practically falling over from the snatch. Ben didn't waste any time in leaving the camp, dipping straight into the trees before anyone could try and stop him.

"Go, Ben!" Wallace cheered, smiling from ear to ear, not sure if he was more pleased in Ben's bravery or the fact Cole got duped and was looking slightly stupid crouched on the ground, recovering.

"No way am I letting Ben win this!" Simone barked before she charged into the trees with typhlosion.

Carl threw scizor's ball into the air and his shining red bug-type emerged above the camp. "Go follow after Ben, Zor, keep him safe."

Wallace watched the red glint of scizor's armor turning in every direction before it took off in the sky in the direction Ben had run off.

One by one each of the trainers present took off into the forest, all in chase of Ben. Persia still looked stunned as Cole and his team followed Simone. Arlette grabbed Persia's hand and pulled her along gently into the trees before Carl followed.

"I can't miss this!" Shannon cheered as she darted from the camp.

Wallace pursed his lips but didn't bother running. Instead, he eased down into a squat before he dropped down onto the ground. "Out of our hands now, Elgy."

Elgyem beeped from agreement on his shoulder before he climbed to Wallace's head and draped himself across. A rustling in the trees garnered elgyem's attention and he started beeping louder like a device designed to detect danger but quieted down when Eleanor came tumbling out of the trees, a twig sticking out of her hair like the backside of a braixen.

"Did I miss all the action?" Eleanor asked as she swatted at her face and tried to finger-comb her hair.

Wallace nodded. "My team has the keys and is rushing to the box," he said.

"You didn't go with?" Eleanor asked as she came walking over and in an elegant motion, crossed her legs and eased down beside him.

Wallace smiled and shook his head. "I'm tired. Ben's running as fast as he can, either he makes it or he doesn't. But if someone gets the keys before him they're not going to waste any time in getting to the box once everyone is on their tail. Where's your partner?" he asked, looking back at the trees, waiting for something else to emerge.

"Azalea?" Eleanor asked, her eyes wide behind her slightly smudged glasses.

"No," Wallace said darkly. "God, no."

Eleanor laughed but looked slightly impressed. "Not a fan? Then who'd you mean? Neo?"

"No," Wallace said again. "Your arcanine," he said softly, avoiding Eleanor's eyes.

"Oh," Eleanor said before she took looked away to avoid having to make eye contact. "After the safari, the school gave me a few choices on what to do with him. They understand that sometimes students or people might be in the way of a pokémon's attack and them being harmed is frowned upon, but they understand it happens. But Krakaota used overwhelming force, according to them, and was called a danger to the student body. So I could either turn him over to the school and they'd release him into the safari somewhere, under supervision, or remove him from my roster and send him home or to the PC."

"What'd you do?" Wallace asked, forcing himself to look at Eleanor who was staring at the sky.

"I found a loophole," she said, grinning, as she pulled a ball from her waist. "Krakaota is my buddy, I couldn't just let him go, even if he might like roaming the islands. But I didn't want to be without him on my team, so I did end up sending him to the box, but not before a trip the campus day-care."

Eleanor let the ball roll from her hand where it bounced across the ground between the two of them and opened. A small gleam of light struck the ground where it formed into a small four-legged pokémon, a feisty-looking growlithe.

"The school said I can't keep Krakaota, so I bred him to get this little guy," Eleanor said as she pat her legs.

The growlithe wasted no time in trouncing over and climbing over Eleanor, plopping his butt down in her lap and licking her fingers. "Rowwl!" he yipped.

Wallace couldn't help but smile at the affectionate pokémon, much less terrifying than what it would evolve into. "Seems fair."

"Yeah," Eleanor said as she rubbed her face against the growlithe's fur. "Yes it does, yes it does! And someday I'll have another arcanine and he can play with Krakaota when I go home or am off campus. And the school is monitoring my training to ensure this one doesn't learn any bad behavior."

Wallace opened his mouth, but his voice was silent under a loud explosion far away on the island. Above the trees a colored smoke signal, one that meshed blue, red, yellow, and green, into rich brown wafted into the air, signaling the end of the assignment. "That's it," he said.

"I wonder who won," Elenaor said as she rubbed growlithe's ears and covered him with kisses.

The crack of a loudspeaker came from every direction, suddenly making the island seem less natural and untouched by the University, before Professor McCloud's voice came through. "Congratulations to Ben Rider, Carl Valrek, and Wallace Peters on being the team to collect all four keys and unlock the winner's box. Students, please return to the southern beach where boats will be arriving shortly to escort you back to campus. Great job everyone, participation points will be awarded to everyone and all of my students will receive an A for this assignment with the winning team earning an automatic A on the semester's final exam."

"Congratulations!" Eleanor said as she reached over and pulled Wallace into a hug that pulled him to the ground.

Growlithe didn't hesitate to join in on the fun as he bounced around, climbing over Eleanor and Wallace and licking whoever's face he could find. Elgyem crawled off Wallace's head and attached himself to growlithe's tail, urging the pokémon to start chasing his tail, but elgyem stayed out of reach as growlithe started making laps around the camp.

Eleanor and Wallace collapsed onto each other, laughing, as they watched growlithe try to both outrun and also catch elgyem, but their fun was cut short by a voice from behind them.

"Ahem!"

Eleanor and Wallace craned their necks around, like two children about to get scolded, to find Neo standing with his arms crossed over them.

"Hi," Wallace said with a sheepish grin.

Eleanor looked between the two boys before she smiled. "Did you two make up?"

"Yeah, we're okay, for now," Neo said as he averted his eyes and looked at his tablet. "Congratulations on winning."

Eleanor gasped and clasped her hands in front of her before she looped an arm around Wallace and reached out to Neo who she practically yanked to the ground, pulling them both in for a hug. "Friends again, let's keep it that way. Right?"

"Right," Garret said, coming up with Kit. "Congrats, Wallace."

Kit turned his notebook around to show off a rendering of the word CONGRATULATIONS written like calligraphy lots of sparkles and shading and sketch effects drawn on the page that probably took him five minutes to do.

Neo adjusted his glasses, still locked in Eleanor's arm, and playfully glared at Wallace who winked back and kissed the air at him, forcing Neo to burst out laughing.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty-Three

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #23:** Do you think now that Wallace has mended his friendships, they'll stay like that? Or will something drive them apart again?


	24. Press Play

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Twenty-Four – Press Play**

 _All significant truths are private truths – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Recalling his strained night roaming the halls of the Health and Wellness Center, Wallace followed lines between the tiles as he made his way through the clinic. The structure of the intensive care unit beckoned the memories of hiding from the threatening presence of the Orphans, but the walls that paralleled him had changed. Dirtied and colorless walls had been bleached white and the tiles that acted as Wallace's map had been cleaned, bearing no scars of when James attacked Izumi or when Eleanor had fought back.

Reaching the split in the hall, Wallace stopped before the nurse's station, a protruding glass room that sat between the rest of the ICU and the burned unit. Several young nurses were typing away on computer stations, their heads down and bound by white and pink nursing caps while head nurse grabbed a file from a tall bookshelf in the back of the room.

"Nurse Joie?" he said, quietly, though he still managed to startle the working nurses and nearly cause Nurse Joie to drop an armful of paperwork in surprise.

"Oh! Wallace, you scared me," Nurse Joie said, hand clamped to her chest as she regained her composure. "You're here to collect your totodile?" The nurse straightened the files in her arms, fixed her hat, and smoothed down a gang of loose strands from her hair bun before she came walking out of the station. "You're a little early," she said, her brows knitted as she looked over a paper attached to a clipboard.

"I couldn't wait any longer." In the weeks following the Orphan's attack, thoughts of Andrew's final video and the miraculous survival and condition of his totodile were all that clouded Wallace's mind after getting the all-clear from the clinic. They'd given him constant reminders that totodile would need special care, more than a normal pokémon, but Wallace was too eager to care. "We're exited." Wallace clapped his hands and elgyem did the same before he waved his hands at Nurse Joie and flashed his green digits.

"That's good" Nurse Joie said. Her weary features of someone who had probably worked throughout the night and longed for a break warmed with a smile. "I'll go check on him, wait around until I come back."

Radiating impatience, Wallace watched Nurse Joie take the ICU Hall to one of the rooms at the end. Beside totodile's room, the double doors of the emergency room were closed, the red light off. Totodile and Nat's aggron had undergone treatment inside, the red light staying on no matter how many times he checked it, but despite the seemingly endless amount of time put in to saving them, only totodile pulled through.

The thought of aggron and its trainer turned Wallace from the ICU and had him tracing tile lines to the burned unit. Whispers of Nat and his condition had permeated campus, most were false, but he knew Nat hadn't left since his admission. Stopping yards from Nat's door, Wallace's mind drifted to Don and Cosmo. The brothers left campus and two weeks had passed without communication, not that Wallace had a number to call or had thought about sending them an email.

As his mind wandered onto the idea of handwriting a letter, a door in the burned unit opened and a squeaky yellow bucket rolled into the hall, Johnny behind it, a dripping mop in hand.

Using Johnny as a tether, Wallace moved further down the hall, forcing himself close to Nat's door. "Johnny, what are you doing here? Why are you mopping floors?" Wallace's eyes fell onto the mop bucket, the small plastic bucket looking complicated with a lever and some kind of plastic netting inside. Though he'd seen one around his house before, never had he dared to touch one.

Johnny sighed and dropped the mop into the bucket, making a splash of green-brown water that dotted the tile. "I volunteered to help the clinic during the renovations and clean-up from that night," he said as he kicked one of the bucket wheels and propped himself against the mop handle. The tanned planes of his face darkened as his mouth curled down and a watery look filled his eyes as they focused on the room across the hall. "I can't stop thinking about the fire."

Wallace focused on the knob to Nat's room to keep from facing Johnny. The exact details of Nat's attack were known by only a dozen or so people, most of them being the clinic staff or the officers on campus. The distraught story of Nat's being engulfed by flames while trying to extinguish the stadium fire was pushed forward by the dean of students to keep the Chara panic at a minimum while authorities worked to find him and his band of terrorists. "You don't need to blame yourself," Wallace said, a poor attempt at consolidation.

Johnny sighed again as he dunked the mop into the bucket, the dreads of the mop head drowned in the murky water. "He was trying to put out the fire, the one I started. Sounds like the blame is on me," he said before he limply moved the mop around the floor. "Or maybe it's yours."

"What?" Wallace asked, gulping down his shock.

"I don't know," Johnny said. "It's one of those things, you keep going back, further and further, to find a root. Whose fault is it? Mine, yours, the people you were fighting?"

"It's definitely not ours."

Johnny dropped the mop into the top half of the bucket and laid his weight on the lever, squeezing dirty water from the mop. "I think I'll try and talk to him today, apologize maybe."

Watching Johnny make small loops across the floor, Wallace said first thing that came to mind. "You haven't apologized yet?"

Johnny's froze, his eyes growing wide with fear. "Do you think I waited too long?"

"No, no, that's not what I meant. I mean, you haven't said anything to him yet? At all?" Wallace asked, glancing toward Nat's room that hadn't changed in two weeks. Possibly because it was too much work to relocate him.

Johnny leaned on the mop handle and shook his head. "He's been in and out of his room for treatments three times a day. I overheard one of the nurses saying he's finally stable. There was some problem with his medication, but they fixed it and he's all good now. Today is the first day he's allowed to have visitors, aside from his family."

"Have you seen his brothers around?" Wallace asked. The thought of Don coming back to campus and missing him caused his heart to skip beat and dip in his chest.

"He has brothers?" Johnny asked, absently, as he began working the mop in a circle.

"Forget it," Wallace said under his breath as he moved toward Nat's room, but paused at the sound of heels against tile. Expecting it to be the nurse, he turned, but found Serena Saint-Mars model-walking the hall like it was a personal catwalk.

"Uh, be careful the floor is kinda wet," Johnny said, gesturing to different spots on the floor.

Serena flipped her ink black hair and tipped her head. Her face said she took Johnny's warning as a challenge and she strutted the rest the hall, stopping in front of Nat's room. "Queens never fall," she said, over her shoulder, like a line from a movie, as she pushed her way into Nat's room.

Taking advantage of the door being open, Wallace hurried toward the room, but slipped on a glossy tile and practically flew into the room following Serena. Colorful balloons and cards, all decorated with different messages that relayed the same thing: get well soon, filled the room. Many different bouquets of flowers sat in ornate vases on every flat surface possible and without looking for a card, Wallace knew Don sent them.

"Can we get a little privacy?" Serena scoffed.

Turning away from the flowers, Wallace gawked at how little time Serena wasted. Her body was bunched up, curled beside Nat in his bed, nestled into his side with an arm draped affectionately over his head. The sight reminded him of how female pokémon spoon their babies. Wallace opened his mouth to form an apology, but Nat's groggy voice gave him pause.

"He can stay, he kept my family safe," Nat said, his voice a humming slur like a blender on low. Bandages covered nearly every inch of his skin, though his eyes were left alone, slitted to the point they looked closed like Nat had risen from a decade long nap.

"I can't believe they did this to you," Serena said, her voice like a child's as she looked over Nat's bandages and rested her head on the pillow beside him. Her other hand came up and ghosted along the edges of his bandages, her hand shaking and cringing every few seconds as if she was scared to actually touch him.

"She knows?" Wallace asked, his brows jumping in surprise.

"There's nothing that happens at this school that I don'tknow," Serena clarified, her diamond eyes glaring at Wallace. "You think I wouldn't get to the bottom of what happened to my Natty? The only thing I don't get is why you didn't fight back!" Serena gritted her teeth, restraining herself as she refocused her eyes on Nat, softening her gaze.

"I can't fight on campus, remember?"Nat flashed her a smile and reached over, laggard, to brush away a strand of hair from her cheek. His hand traced the curve of her face, Serena's eyes fluttering shut in response to his touch. Nat cupped her face before he gave her cheek a few pinches, her fair skin reddening. "Roses, roses. And if I lived the attack, I couldn't have you mad at me for breaking one of your rules."

Nat's hand fell from her cheek as if he lost the strength to hold it there, but instead it cupped her chin, holding her here until she reopened her eyes. Wallace watched Serena turn from Nat and sit upright on the edge of the bed, dabbing at her eyes. Despite sitting inches from him, Serena tried her best to hide the tears that trailed her cheeks, as if Nat couldn't tell.

Serena rubbed at her nose, gave her eyes another swipe, and sniffled, straightening her back, but didn't turn to face him. "You're so stupid," she said, her voice wet.

"I know." Nat turned away from her, but kept smiling.

Feeling the weight of his presence in the room, Wallace inched toward the door, tears of his own pricking his eyes. He reached for the knob, but it turned under his hand and opened to reveal Nurse Joie outside the room.

"Johnny said you were in here, Wallace, your totodile is ready," she said, her eyes dancing over the room before she backed out and retreated to the nurse's station

"Bye Serena. Bye Nat." Wallace cleared his throat and followed the nurse, but as the door closed he turned back to the room. "Nat, Don hasn't been by, has he?"

Nat looked away from Serena, his hand massaging her back. "No. Just my parents. From what they tell me he and Cosmo are basically on house arrest. My mom and dad only come one at a time because they won't leave them home alone. Why?"

"No reason," Wallace said with a short wave and pulled the door shut. He passed Johnny who stared at Nat's room, as he hurried to the nurse's station, Nurse Joie waiting at the counter for him. Something blue moving around on the desk caused Wallace's to start jogging in eagerness.

"Meet your totodile," Nurse Joie said as she laid her arms on the desk, using them as bumpers for the small, but fiesty totodile who's nails scratched across the desk as it crawled back and forth. With its eyes closed, totodile continued to bump into the nurse's arms, letting out a high hissing sound each time it was prevented from exploring.

Wallace touched a hand to his chest, a pang of sorrow striking him to the core. He'd researched everything he could regarding totodile in preparation and he knew the baby was below average size for a newborn and its color was wan, like a watered down glass of berry juice. Watched the totodile sit back and tip its head from side to side as its nostrils flared. Its eyes stayed shut as it fell back onto the desk and scooted over the desk, hitting the nurse's hands that kept it from shuffling straight to the floor. "Can, can it see?" Wallace asked, the realization of why the nurse was sheltering totodile smacking him head on.

Nurse Joie's exhaled as she grabbed the totodile and pulled it to her chest, tilting its head to the side as she ran a finger under one of its eyes. "Totodile and its evolutions develop something called a nictitating membrane," she said as she pulled tugged on one of totodile's eyelids, revealing a pale red eye staring back at him.

"A what? Nick what?" Wallace asked, following the nurse's finger as she ran it under totodile's eye.

"It's a third eyelid that moistens the eye, but unlike a human's eyelid, it still allows them to see," Nurse Joie said. "It's vital for some pokémon who develop them to be able to see clearly underwater. One of the complications for your totodile, due to it being hatched prematurely is that its third eyelid is still forming in its left eye and so what you get is this." Nurse Joie flipped totodile, whose long snout opened to snap at the nurse. "Around this eye there's a build-up of fluid. This isn't as big a problem around the right eye. The lid is still forming on that eye, but it seems not to cause totodile any discomfort to open its right eye."

Wallace leaned in close and followed the nurses's finger as she outlined a thick wet link of gunk gathered in the crease of totodile's eye, caking onto the light blue scales. "It's looks nasty."

"You better get used to it," Nurse Joie said. "For totodile's eyelid to fully develop and for his eyes to be healthy you're going to need to clean the gunk away, cotton swabs will work. Do it daily, or whenever you see build up." Nurse Joie angled the totodile, butt first toward Wallace and handed him off.

Wallace's hands clenched totodile's scaled body, the water-type's red scaled tail flicking against his chest as Wallace held him behind his head. "What if he bites me?" Wallace asked as totodile's mouth opened in response.

"He will," Nurse Joie said, matter-of-factly. "But that's normal. He's still a baby and is going to have a lot to learn before he catches up with the rest of his species. It's going to take a lot of work, are you sure you're up for it?"

Wallace bobbed in his aggressively and held totodile to his chest, slightly afraid the nurse might take it back if he showed any doubt. "I can do this, I raised elgyem," Wallace said to his shoulder where elgyem sat, eyeing the newest addition to the team with his yellow blinkers on.

"Right," Nurse Joie said. "Well, be sure to keep water around for totodile to get used to swimming, he'll also like sun bathing. He'll be very susceptible to element damage, so try not to let him roam too much in high grass, his scales have a lot of development to do. Also, your totodile is a boy. Have you thought about a nickname?"

Wallace looked over totodile, recalling how hard it was for him to try and name elgyem and how he hadn't tried to name spinarak, but something in the spirit of the wriggly water-type made him want to try again. Touching a finger above totodile's good eye, Wallace lifted the skin and totodile's eye darted under the lid. "He's a winky boy," Wallace said, his voice dripping into that of baby talk. "Wink, wonk, winker – no – winky, wink, wonk," Wallace cooed as he lifted and closed totodile's eye before he moved onto rubbing the scales on top of his head. "Woo, woo, woo."

Nurse Joie crossed her arms and cleared her throat.

"Sorry," Wallace jumped and blushed, clearing his own throat. "Um, Wink sounds good," he said, deepening his voice.

"Wink it is," Nurse Joie said, eyeing Wallace as she made a note in her clipboard. "I'll be emailing you with tips and services available for helping train and take care of Wink. I'll also be in touch about regular check-ups. We want to keep Wink healthy," she said as she risked a scratch under Wink's chin, the totodile snapping at her a little too late to bite her fingers. "That's all I had to say, do you have any questions?"

Wallace shook his head as he ran his tongue over his slips. "I don't think so, thank you."

"You're welcome," she said as she dropped a hand onto his shoulder as she moved to pass him. "I told you, we aren't in the business in letting lives slip through our fingers."

Her recollection of the night he brought Wink and his broken egg into the Center flashed through Wallace's mind like a bolt of lightning. "Nurse Joie."

The nurse hummed as she turned, gripping her board in front of her legs. "What is it?"

"The aggron, that came in the same night as me," Wallace said, lowering his voice, mindful of their distance from Nat's room.

"Oh."

Wallace felt lightheaded as he watched the nurses's unbreakable professional manner shatter at the mention of the death that did occur that night. Tasked with at least three lives to save in one night she and her team managed to hold onto two, and though Wallace was grateful to hold his totodile, he couldn't help but feel a pang of guilt that Nat wouldn't get to see his aggron again.

"It was tough," Nurse Joie said, her eyes on the floor. "Its burns were severe and on a steel-type, like grass-types, that matters more than anything. Burning them to the point their bodies become deformed is crucial to their rate of survival and it looked like Nat's aggron attempted to shield its trainer from a very powerful attack. The fire melted its armor and pierced through to its bones, the degree of its injuries were too much for it and it passed away while we were working to provide treatment."

Wallace watched the nurse dab at her eye as she finished reciting what sounded like a professional and practiced summary from a medical form. "I understand," he said. "I'm sorry."

"That's my line." Nurse Joie's head snapped up, her eyes alert, but her mouth curled into a tight smile that faded quickly. "I spend my days apologizing for the wonders of modern medicine not being able to cure every problem I face. I apologize that this building isn't the place trainers can walk into, drop their pokémon off on the counter, wait four seconds, and leave, knowing their team is perfect again. No one apologizes to me."

Wallace shifted on his feet and swallowed a lump in his throat the size of a shoe. "I can – can't imagine what that must feel like, to do your best and have someone slip through your fingers."

"Wallace, why are you here? At Radix?" Nurse Joie asked, clearing her throat and slapping her mask of the head nurse back on. "We're not supposed to ask about student's intentions with the University, but I'm curious."

"I don't really know, I just kind of ended up here?" he said, maneuvering the minefield of lies laid across his mind. "Just trying to get by right now."

The nurse nodded, eyeing him. "If you decide you want a part-time job, or see yourself wanting to select a field to focus on, come talk to me. I'm always in need of more nurses. The experience could be invaluable. Arlette Bellerose, she's one of my nurses, she's learning a lot. The two of you could be friends."

"Heh, I doubt that," he replied under his breath. "I'll think about it."

"Please do," she said as she turned and waved overhead. "I'm off, have a good day, Wallace."

* * *

Leaving the Health and Wellness Center, Wallace made a loop past Hawthorn Library and followed one of the campus's main pathways that led him to the fountains, carrying his totodile with care like it was a glass jar with a bomb inside. The stone fountains buzzed with students trying to enjoy the attraction before fall rolled in, but Wallace found a vacant stone block he crawled on and let totodile go as he used his legs to keep him fenced in.

Tapping spinarak's ball on the stone he called out the bug-type and ushered elgyem from his shoulder. "Time for a meet and greet, boys," he said, as spinarak skittered down his leg and stalked along his calf, eyeing the totodile before he crawled closer and circled totodile who was still as stone. Elgyem didn't seem interested, plopping in Wallace's lap and watching the water-type from afar.

Wallace dropped his bag off and fished inside for a baggie of food and spread its pellets across the stone. Spinarak was the first to attack it, attaching a line to one particularly large pellet and dragging it away toward Wallace's feet and curling over it.

"No one's going to steal your food, spinarak," Wallace said as elgyem gathered a few pieces for himself and levitated them into his mouth. Totodile remained unmoving, his eyes closed, looking content to bathe in the sun.

"Should I feed you?" Wallace asked, recalling a video of a trainer hand feeding her totodile through each of its evolutions. The cute act became daunting as the little water-type grew to be twice its original size. Wallace scooped a handful of the food pellets and grabbed totodile, angling him toward his body. "Don't try and bite my fingers off," Wallace said, holding out a pellet and popping it into the pokémon's mouth.

Like a trap sprung, Wink's mouth snapped shut on the pellet, crushing it into powder. On instinct Wallace felt his toes curl inside his shoes. "Oh okay, I see," he said as he held the next pellet with the tip of his fingers and tossed it toward totodile and pulled back.

Wink caught the second pellet like the first, mashing it with its jaws without the need to use the sharp nubs of his teeth. With each pellet, Wallace's fear lessened until totodile let out a low hum and his mouth slowly shut, refusing to eat anymore.

"It's not even.

"So?"

"So put it up higher! No, not that high you ass."

Wallace turned his attention Lilac Hall that sat across the quad from the fountains. A makeshift bulletin board stood in the shadow of the hall and Persia and Calvin were there, in the process of hanging a large poster and bickering.

"It looks even from my side!" Calvin let go of his side of the poster, his corner hanging lopsided compared to Persia's as he barked back at her. "Maybe you're the one who's off, ever think about that?"

"You ever think about my foot up your butt?" Persia asked as she stood on her toes and tried to make the glossy and oversized flyer hang even.

"I mean, that's a little kinky, but I'd try anything once," Calvin said as made a quick adjustment before he surrendered on making it even.

As Persia and Calvin joined in front of the poster, still bickering, Wallace squinted, even through his glasses, to see what their poster advertised. Between their moving bodies he made out the word SAFARI and EXPEDITION and REOPENING.

"C'mon," he said as he slid off the stone. Elgyem clung to the front of Wallace's shirt, spinarak mounted Wink like a man would mount a steed, and Wallace scooped the totodile under his arm. Carrying his newest team member under his arm like a ball, Wallace headed toward the board, but tried to stay out of range to keep Calvin or Persia from seeing him, a futile effort.

"Walter! Your name's Walter right?" Calvin asked, looping an arm over Persia's neck as they turned away from the board.

"It's Wilbur," Persia scoffed, rolling her eyes as she wrapped her arms around Calvin's chest. "Kidding, I know it's Wallace. You interested?" she asked, nodding to the board.

Close to the board, Wallace could see the flyer was an advertisement for the reopening of the safari islands and offered a trip to any of the islands for a group of at least five students. "The safari is reopening? We were just there for an assignment last week."

"Yeah, but that was a specific island with security and supervision and blah blah," Calvin said, his eyes rolling back and his mouth flapping open. "But this is the first time since that thing happened the island with the mansion on it is going to be open for travel." Calvin's eyes narrowed at Wallace and his mouth spread into a goofy grin. "You were one of them weren't you? One of the students in the mansion, oh shit, it was you! You're the one that killer wants!"

Wallace flared his nostrils and looked to Persia who gazed at Calvin, her mouth agape. "So?"

"I could offer you some self-defense classes if you want to protect yourself," Calvin said, extending his hand.

"I'm fine, thanks," Wallace said, though it sounded like a good idea.

Calvin shrugged as he pulled Persia away. "Think about it!"

Wallace watched them leave, though they didn't turn back to him, and wondered who else on campus knew him from the day Chara attack them in the safari and if Simone and Ben went through the same thing. Stepping closer to the board, Wallace read over the safari flyer that promised a _unique and exciting experience full of diversity_ if students chose to participate. "Fat chance," he said as his eyes drifted to two flyers beside it, one advertising a homecoming dance for the first of October and another that promoted the PRESS PLAY movement on campus, students in favor of Andrew's final video playing for the public.

A pair of arms holding the ends of another flyer slid into view, tackling a poster for the Rose Gardening Club to the board. "Signup is in Neroli Hall if you're interested," Eleanor said as she adjusted the poster and stepped back to admire her quick work. "I'm filling in in some of Bella's spots while he's off campus," Eleanor dropped her hands on her hips and exhaled, looking like it was the first time she'd taken a solid breath all day.

"Any idea when he's coming back?" Wallace asked.

"No. I should call him, I'm a terrible friend." Eleanor said with a small frown and reached out to touch the PRESS PLAY poster. "Are you going to this?"

"I really wasn't planning on it," he said. On the bottom of the poster someone had drawn a cartoon character pressing play on a vintage tape player. The longer he stared at the character the more he imagined it jumping off the paper and opening its animated mouth to proclaim his guilt. "I have class tonight until nine."

"Perfect, the meeting doesn't start until 9:30. You should come, a bunch of us are going, there's going to be free food, it'll be fun," Eleanor said, nudging him. "I've got to get going, c'mon Stark."

Wallace turned to see Eleanor's newest team member, her growlithe wagging his tail behind them, a satchel of rolled flyers strapped to his body. Eleanor gave the top of his head a quick scratch before she jogged off, her growlithe on her heels with an abnormal amount of pep in his steps.

* * *

Wallace looked away from his unfinished sketch of a species's family tree, an attempt to understand how to transfer egg moves across species to Professor Ishimaru, Xan, who choose to announce the conclusion to his three hour caretaking lecture with a statement.

"We've got a little bit of time left, so, let's talk about sex," Xan said as he adjusted the cuffs of his rolled up sleeves and sat on a vacant desk at the front of classroom.

Xan wasn't one of the younger professors, the lines of his face suggesting many decades of life full of adventure and excitement, but the way the words rolled off his tongue and his body language suggested he was someone twenty years younger. The typical scuff along his jawline had grown out a bit, giving definition to his dark skin and square jaw, but it made him seem older and worldly, more so than his choice of conversation starters implied.

A series of snickers, coughs, and guffaws arose from the class. In particular Wallace saw two different reactions from his classmates whose elbows he bumped throughout the lecture. To his left, Garret's face looked like someone swiped him with a pink highlighter, but his partner to the right, Simone, rolled her eyes and fell back in her seat, her facing twisting up.

In the row ahead of him he saw Arlette's back twinge, the fabric of her grey hoodie shifting as he guessed the topic made her as uncomfortable as Garret looked.

"I thought that would get your attention," Xan said as he slid off the desk and rounded it, heading back to the low table at the front of their classroom in the Origin Center. "Really, what I want to talk about is the product of sex. Babies, or in the case of pokémon, eggs." Xan gestured to two purple pieces of cloth that draped over tall rectangular objects on his desk. "I got a couple donations from the Health and Wellness Center the other day and thought I'd save them for you guys."

Wallace straightened in his seat, but others stood and rose on their toes to see to the front of the class. Through a crack between Arlette's shoulder and the thigh of a boy who'd invaded her personal space, Wallace saw Xan whip the cloth away and reveal two large pokémon eggs in glass incubators.

"I've got two eggs I'm willing to give away to two lucky students," Xan said to a room full of gasps.

Wallace couldn't help as his face scrunched up, in dismay at how excited everyone was. He glanced to Wink, who posed on the table on top of his bookbag while elgyem had decided upon a nap in his lap halfway through the lecture. Although his time hatching eggs hadn't been easy or without problem, he'd hatched two pokémon with minimal support or knowledge of what the hell a breeder went through nd wasn't interested in giving it another try. To avoid being one of those lucky students, Wallace sunk down in his seat and pulled Wink closer, the totodile's nails scratching the desk, to hide behind him.

"Who wants one?" Xan asked, his arms out in surrender.

Hands shot into the air, waving like flags in the midst of a storm, and Xan cupped his chin and narrowed his eyes as he walked the front of the classroom.

"It's nice to know so many of you are interested in looking after some unknown pokémon," Xan said. "But I've already made my decision and it's based off performance in my class."

Wallace gave up on trying to hide, knowing his grade had dropped severely after he missed the last two classes and failed his test on calculating egg cycles. "What's the big deal?" he asked, his whisper aimed in Simone's direction.

"You never know what you'll get with eggs," Simone said as she picked at her nails, her disinterest in the eggs rivaling Wallace's. "Perfect values, nature, stats, egg moves, a shiny. You could have the perfect genetic species and you'd never know. Also, it could be something rare and hard to catch."

Xan pulled a clipboard from his desk and flipped back a few pages before he squinted at the page and ran his finger down it. "In class ranking, our first egg is going to, Garret Baker, congratulations."

Wallace felt Garret jerk beside him as all eyes in the room turned on him. Garret's head dropped and his shoulders shrugged up, the human equivalent of what a shuckle might do, as he shied away from the attention.

Xan dropped a hand on one of the incubators. "You can pick whichever you like, though I won't give you any hints about what's inside."

"The one on the right," Garret said quickly.

Wallace cocked a brow up as he focused his eyes on the incubators. The type of glass that surrounded the eggs seemed frosted or cloudy by design and made it impossible to determine what the egg's design was.

"Alright, egg-cellent," Xan said, taking a pregnant pause to quietly laugh at his own joke. "And that means our other egg goes to the one below Garret in ranking, which is... Arlette Bellerose."

Wallace's lip curled up in disgust and out of instinct as Xan called out her name. He watched her shoulders jump and her head bury into the neck of her hoodie as the eyes in the classroom shifted from Garret onto her her, several girls in the back scoffing at her.

"Come up and collect your eggs," Xan said, oblivious to the lukewarm responses his choices had gotten.

Garret and Arlette seemed to make as much noise as possible as they left their seats and shuffled to the front to collect their eggs. Judging by the looks they received on their way back to their seats Wallace guessed the egg felt like targets or burden, cast onto them by their classmates.

"Wallace, I see your egg hatched," Xan said, plopping down on another desk and stretching his already long body out to see him.

Wallace scratched down WInk's body, the totodile's mouth easing open in response. "A little ahead of time, but yeah."

"I heard something about that," Xan said, his mouth downturned. "If you need any advice or help you can always ask me."

Wallace nodded as he watched Xan twist around to check the wall clock before he slapped his hands on his legs. "Looks like we're done for today. I'll see you all next week, Garret, Arlette, I'll expect to see progress with your eggs. Wallace, I want to follow up with you and if anyone else has hatched anything recently I want to know! Next week we'll focus on outside factors that contribute to hatch time!"

Xan's words seem to fall on deaf ears as the class hurried out the door, Wallace guessed to rush to the PRESS PLAY meeting in the student union. He took his time packing his supplies and rousing elgyem to sheepishly climbed back onto his shoulder and draped himself over, falling back asleep almost instantly.

"Are you coming to the meeting?" Simone asked, swinging her book bag over her shoulder. "Going to be interesting."

Wallace grimaced, trying to come up with an excuse. "I don't know, not really interesting in the whole video thing," he lied, the video and its contents being nearly all he thought about.

"Liar," Simone sighed as she turned and marched down their aisle. "I can see it on your face, you want to know what that boy said before he died, but you don't want to care. God, you're such a hipster."

"A what?" Wallace asked, trailing behind Simone with Garret's feet dragging behind them.

"A hipster. With your chunking and oversized black glasses," Simone said. "I heard from Neo you still haven't even properly caught your elgyem and I'm guessing its the same for that new totodile of yours."

Wallace curled his arm tighter around Wink who rested in the crook of his arm and realized he hadn't had a Poké Ball on him when the Nurse handed him over and wondered how long he could get away without technically catching Wink, or elgyem for that matter. "So?"

"Forget it," Simone said, throwing her hands up. "I'm only going to this stupid meeting because one of my professor's is offering extra credit if we go and write a report about it."

"Really?"

"Mhm, it's a little class about idols and important figures in the world," Simone said. "I can't think of someone bigger than Andrew Gates right now, even dead he's all anyone is talking about. He's like a virus."

Before Wallace could say anything, Arlette bounded past them, her arms locked around her incubator. Her head was down and her feet carried her swiftly past Simone and down to the first floor and out the glass doors where she vanished around the corner.

"That was his girlfriend wasn't it?" Simone asked, her voice black and white. "Very sensitive," she said as she pulled ahead of Wallace and Garret and left the building.

"One of them."

Wallace's nearly broke his neck whipping around to Garret who had his head down, her gaze elsewhere. "Did that just come from your mouth?" he asked.

Garret shrugged and held his egg to his chest. "I hear things," he said with impressive vagueness.

"Ouch," Wallace said as he slammed the handicap button and the doors leading outside opened for them.

"Can I ask you something? What are you feelings about Arlette?"

"My feelings?" Wallace asked. "As in...?"

"How do you feel about her?" Garret said, reforming his question. "Someone told me they saw her go into our room a while ago and they heard lots of voices and banging around and things like that... and then she stormed out. I just – I want to know – how you feel about her."

Wallace waved his free arm in front of his face, his cheeks burning. "Well that banging and yelling wasn't what you're thinking. It was just talking and stuff, we were arguing about, something. As far as how I feel about her, I don't really have an opinion," he said, somewhat of the truth. Despite reading her diary entires about Andrew and considering having Izumi dig up information about her, Wallace was still unsure of what to make of the girl who seemed to play second fiddle to Azalea in Andrew's life. The girl was weak enough to be slapped down by Azalea, but brave enough to confront and attack him, a mystery wrapped in that dingy grey hoodie of hers. "Why?" he asked as they walked down the sidewalk headed toward the main area of campus.

"The dance is coming up," Garret said.

"Homecoming?"

"Yeah, Neo said he and Eleanor are going together," Garret said, his voice growing softer like someone was hitting the volume down button on his voice box. "I wanted to ask Arlette to go with me, but I didn't know if you were going to – take her or something."

"I think Arlette would rather take a rabid houndour to the dance than me," Wallace said. "I know I would, If you want to ask her, go ahead. She doesn't seem like the type to go to dances, but you never know."

"Thanks," Garret said. "Are you going with anyone?"

Wallace shrugged. "I hadn't thought about it, maybe I could ask Tempest?"

"Go for it! Then we could triple date," Garret said. "But, only if Arlette says yes. Are you really not going to the meeting?"

Wallace paused on the corner, just a few more steps and he'd be inside the ICO, but he could take the left path and end up at the student union. "Are you? Arlette is probably going, but do you want to sit there while people discuss Andrew in front of her?"

"Not really, but if she gets upset I could comfort her," Garret said, the tone and emotion in his voice moving like the front car of a rollercoaster.

Wallace couldn't help but to smile at Garret's determination to always be the nice guy, despite how tiring it sounded. "If you're going I am too," he said.

* * *

When Garret and Wallace arrived at the PRESS PLAY meeting, following signs and posters in the student union lobby to the third floor lounge called The Roost, the room, that was nothing more than a balcony that overlooked the cafeteria below, was packed with students. Chairs had been arranged in front of a stage on the far side of the room and between there and the elevator Wallace stepped off, nearly every surface had a warm body sitting on it.

Wallace and Garret wandered through a crowd of students hanging around the entrance before they found a stretch of wall to lean against beside a row of computers. Across the room a microphone had been set up on the stage and the crowd seemed to be waiting patiently for whoever the speaker was to get up there.

"I see Neo and Eleanor," Garret said, pointing toward the opposite side of the room where Eleanor was leaning against a railing and Neo was showing her something on his tablet, their faces full of smiles and lit up by the tablet's screen.

Scanning the crowd, Wallace picked out many faces he recognized. Persia and Calvin were sitting other on one half of a sectional couch while Cole and Denvy's assistant Mieko were sitting close on the other side. Arlette was standing alone by the girl's bathroom door and Simone was perched in a chair near the front of the room.

The sound of someone thumping the microphone brought Wallace's attention to the stage where Shannon had taken her place behind the mic. Her chocolate brown curls were tamed in a high ponytail that brushed her bare shoulder, an oversized pink sweater hanging off her body. "Welccome, welcome, welcome, to the PRESS PLAY meeting," Shannon announced like she was refereeing a wrestling match. "The whole point of coming together tonight is for us, the would-be student colleagues of Andrew Gates to become more informed about his final video. If you didn't know, Andrew was scheduled to come to school here, but his disappearance and death obviously threw a wrench into that plan."

"Until a body is found he isn't technically dead!" a voice in the crowd shouted.

"Well, his parents have released a statement saying they believe him to be dead, soooo we're gonna go with that," Shannon said.

"But that's not how the system works, you – "

"Silence!" Shannon said, her voice shrill and crisp. "This is not an open floor debate. I am your host and I, and I alone, will be speaking."

"What makes you the expert?" Neo asked, his tablet off and his attention on the stage.

Wallace's eyes fell from Neo's face to his hand, entwined with Eleanor's, their fingers massaging each other's knuckles.

"Glad you asked," Shannon said as she dusted off her shoulder. "I've done a few things here and there before I came to Radix. Like assisting in renovations in Hoenn as well as attending a university in Unova, but when I arrived in Kalos I got a job with the illustrious Pearce Productions."

Wallace clenched his teeth so tight heard his jaw pop as he straightened up and narrowed his eyes at Shannon. Out of all the interns and temps that have breezed through Pearce Productions it was impossible to remember all their faces, but nothing at all had rung a bell when he met Shannon in the safari last week. Had she recognized him she would have said something the minute she saw him. Wallace let out a deep breath and adjusted his glasses and ran a hand over his head, the biggest crutches to his new identity hadn't failed him yet.

"While I worked there I got to know a lot about PokéView, now let me ask, how many of you here tonight have a PokéView account?" Shannon asked, raising her own hand.

Wallace watched as hands popped up among the crowd in front of the stage and continued to rise in a wave until the very back of the room. By the time the last hand was up it would have been easier for Wallace to count how many had kept their hands in their laps.

"Excellent," Shannon said. "Well, unlike every peasant who raised their hand, Andrew's account was sponsored by Pearce Productions and every video he uploaded to his account was managed through the company's servers. I turned in my two week notice to the company just shortly before school started here and I was out the door just a few days after Andrew went missing. But, me being the crafty girl that I am, kept hold of my log-in information and got a little notification from the company that a new video of Andrew's had gone up the night of his birthday."

"Duh, he posted the video of his birthday party."

"Everyone saw it."

"Tell us something we don't know!"

Shannon snatched the mic from its holder and stormed off stage. "Stop interrupting me! As I was going to say, there was another video he uploaded, hours after the birthday video. This video went up as private, meaning it wasn't viewable until he changed the setting to public or took it down. Shortly after he went missing the Pearce Production employees were all handed gag orders which prevented them from speaking about Andrew or revealing any details about him to anyone. But because I was no longer a part of the company, that order missed little ol' me! When I saw the private video notification, it didn't interest me, but then the news reports started coming out, and all the claims of him vanishing and mysterious timelines."

"So why wait so long?" Neo asked.

"Honestly? I forgot about it," Shannon said with a shrug as she climbed back on stage. "With all the prep and planning for moving onto campus the idea about the video slipped my mind, but as the story picked up again I remembered and decided to let the tip slip to some little magazine in Lumiose who ran with it and it got picked up by the news."

"Boring."

Wallace, and many others in the room, turned their attention to one part of the section couch that sat under a suspended flatscreen. A girl with skin and hair like snowfall sat hunched over, her elbows on her thighs and her round face resting in her hands. Her eyes were narrowed, glaring to the front of the room, and her face looked like the dictionary definition of uninterested.

"Excuse you?" Shannon asked, her mouth close to the mic as she stared out across the room, using her hand as a visor. "Will the peanut gallery please speak up?"

"I said, boring," the white-haired girl said, a thick braided halo looping her head while there rest of her locks fell in graceful strands down her back.

"And who might you be?" Shannon said. "Besides someone in need of a tan."

"Willow Oakburn," she said, letting the dig at her complexion roll of her back.

"Oakburn, like Professor Oakburn?" Calvin asked, looking over his shoulder at her.

"She's my sister," Willow said, passing only the most fleeting of glances in Calvin's direction.

"Well, sister of Professor Oakburn, if this meeting is so boring, why don't you leave?" Shannon asked, gesturing to the elevator, then the staircase door, and finally to the balcony, insisting Willow could take the flying leap option if she wanted.

"It's not the meeting, although your stage presence leaves much to be desired," Willow said as she twirled a stand of her hair around her knuckle. "It's him, Andrew, like who cares?"

Wallace's brows shot up as a chorus of gasps filled the room. "Who is this girl?" he asked.

"I'm so over hearing about him and his family and this whole mess. This cover-up is so messy and ill planned it's embarrassing," Willow said as she stretched out her long legs and messed the tattered end of a hole above the knee in her jeans.

"Cover-up?" Shannon asked. "What are you talking about? Have you even been watching the news?"

Willow nodded, her lips spreading in a cynical smile. "Oh yes, that train wreck, I've seen all the reports, but you're a fool to believe any of it. You really don't think the police couldn't find someone who is arguably the most sought about trainer? Andrew didn't even have a lot of league wins under his belt, the endorsements and television appearances make him more entertaining than any of the champions or elite four, and yet his body is no where to be found. It's a cover-up."

"So you're the sister of a professor, are you the daughter of a detective too?" Calvin asked.

"No, I'm just not blind," Willow said. "Andrew isn't missing, he's dead, and his body isn't lost, it's been claimed a long time ago by the authorities who are under Arlan Pearce's control. They're holding the body in secret and feeding the news fake stories all to build up this case and now this mystery video is building up excitement for PokéView, all of which is lining Arlan's pockets."

"That's an interesting theory," Shannon said. "But it's all speculation."

"We'll find out soon enough," Willow said. "I've already begun hacking Pearce Production's servers to download the video. Today is Wednesday, I'll give the PRESS PLAY movement and the news and whoever else wants to throw their name into the hat until Saturday night to get their acts together before I leak the video and show you all the truth."

"You've seen the video?" Neo asked, adjusting his glasses. "Because I happen to know the footage hasn't been cracked yet, I happen to be looking into it as well."No, I haven't," Willow said. "But I've got it on good authority about what the video is about. But don't listen to the crazy girl spouting conspiracy theories, I don't know what I'm talking about." Willow shrugged and stood up, making a loop around the seating area as she headed for the elevator. "The truth comes out during the Homecoming dance."

* * *

Hours later, Wallace tipped a water bottle back and took a squick swig as he paced the floor of his room. On his bed elgyem was sitting on his pillow, his head moving in time with his trainer's movements as Wallace made quick and sharp turns on the tiled floor. "Who this girl?" he asked.

"I don't know," Izumi said from his place at Wallace's desk, looking a bit too big for the wooden desk despite only being a few years older than a senior. "But please, sit down and stop pacing, you're anxiety is infectious. And you know that's water, not alcohol right?" he said, wagging his pen tip at Wallace.

"I know, I'm – I'm stressed," Wallace said, full of breath as he dropped onto his bed so hard it sent elgyem flying. "Sorry," he said as elgyem righted himself in the air.

"I can tell," Izumi said as he turned back to the mess he'd created on Wallace's desk, a mass of paperwork and folders spread before him. "I don't mind urgent late night calls, but I prefer them to be from women. Anyway, did you really have to call so late, why couldn't this have waited until the morning?"

Wallace shook his head, his leg jumping, before he shot up and started pacing. "I can barely sit still, there's no way I can sleep right now Homecoming is the day after tomorrow. She knows something, something big. She said the truth comes out during the dance. The truth. The truth," Wallace repeated, crossing the room and looming over Izumi.

The Forger cowered, comically, under Wallace before he shooed him away. "It's three in the morning, how are you so wired? Don't tell me it's all nerves."

"No," Wallace answered quickly. "I bought all the energy drinks from the vending machine downstairs because I couldn't even think about sleeping. She can't be trusted, she can't be let to walk around campus right now. Her sister works here, can we get her fired?" Wallace's eyes lit up before he dove for his bed and fished his phone out from under his pillow. "One call is all it would take."

"Down boy," Izumi said as he gently pulled the phone from Wallace's shaking hands. "No one is getting fired."

"Can we get Willow expelled?" Wallace asked, his hand grasping through the air for his phone. "She mentioned hacking into the Pearce Production servers, that's illegal, we can get her arrested. Arlette was arrested, it's easy. Give me my phone, I'll call my father's IT team."

Izumi's face scrunched up before he dropped Wallace's phone into his shirt pocket. "Listen to you, throwing around all that rich boy talk. _I'll get my daddy on you!_ Remember, Mr. Peters, we may have let your keep your money when we did the ol' switch-a-roo-who-are-you, but you're not the son Arlan Pearce right now and calling in rich boy favors isn't going to keep your identity in the dark. And the next time you call me for this kind of thing, lay off the caffeine. I'm starting to feel jittery just looking at you," Izumi said, his shoulders jerking. "It's like someone put you on vibrate and laid you on top of a washing machine on high in a car bouncing over a rocky road."

"So what do we do?" Wallace asked, his eyes shifting from Izumi, to the pocket of his shirt, to the ceiling, and then to elgyem who had taken to floating around the light fixture. "We need a plan, we have to do something."

"We are," Izumi said, his tone calm and level to contrast Wallace's. "Come look at what I gathered. It's not my finest work, but it lays the ground work for what we're dealing with."

Wallace slid off his bed and hovered over Izumi the point he could smell the man's shampoo as he looked over the arrangement on his desk. At the top of the desk were pictures of Professor Sienna and her sister Willow Oakburn. He'd only had one run-in with the professor, during his lab when her sawsbuck nearly trampled him, she seemed to be the less passionate of the sisters.

"Sienna was born in Kalos and studied under Professor Sycamore, very original, I know, and from there traveled overseas before returning and attending Radix," Izumi said, his eyes skimming a file in his hand as his finger rested at the base of Sienna's picture.

"She's an alumni here?" Wallace asked.

"Yes, but it wasn't smooth sailing. When she returned to Kalos she was greeted to the news that her father had passed away, after that she came to school, but left during her third year due to her mother's mental health issues." Izumi dropped the file onto the desk and leaned back, adjusting his shirt as he cast a skeptical eye on the file. "Turns out the Oakburn family is what some would call cursed. Sienna and Willow had another sister and a brother, both who were killed in an accident. It took some time for Sienna to leave home again, but she did finish her degree and graduated before she returned as a professor before Willow enrolled."

"So what does she have to do with my father's company?" Wallace asked.

Izumi shrugged as he tapped his knuckles against the desk. "It seems purely extracurricular, like she might have taken an interest in the video for fun. Do you have any idea what it could be?"

"No, I thought about logging into Andrew's account, but it would show a log in on campus, which would look suspicious," Wallace said, pacing beside his bed.

"What a mess," Izumi said as he shifted out of the wooden chair and stretched his legs. "You want me to take all this with me?" he asked, waving his hand over the papers on the desk.

Wallace looked over the lives of Sienna and Willow Oakburn lying across the wood. "No, leave it. I'll think of something."

"Heh, I don't like how that sounds," Izumi said, wagging his finger in the air over his head as he reached the door. "I'll be back to keep an eye on you, to make sure Willow Oakburn doesn't come up missing, or worse."

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty-Four

* * *

Debut of **Willow** **Oakburn** by **The Awkward Trumpet**.

 **Question of the Chapter #23:** Do you think there's anything Wallace can do to prevent the video from playing?


	25. Eclipse

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud**  
 **Chapter Twenty Five – Eclipse**

 _And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough,_  
 _we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace tumbled across his bed and let his head hang over the edge. The inverted view of his dorm presented him with the sight of Garret in bed, curled into a ball with his mareep resting between his legs. On the floor between them laid a snoring Neo who shared his pillow with a tuft of white fur, the body of his newest team member, a swirlix.

Wallace stroked Wink's back, the water-type laying flat across his stomach, as he surveyed the damage they'd done the previous night. A toppled pile of DVD cases laid at the base of the room's dresser with dozens propped beside Garret's television. Empty bags 8of snacks and empty soda bottles had congregated Neo's inflatable bed. As homecoming approached, students had Friday off to allow them to participate in the crowning ceremony and annual homecoming battle and without class the idea of a movie night sprung into Wallace's head, but only by Izumi's suggestion after witnessing Wallace drive himself up a wall across the ceiling worrying about Willow and the release of Andrew's final video.

Curling upright, careful to keep Wink from tumbling to the bed, Wallace fiddled with the latch for his window and pushed it open, hoping to air out the stink three boys rough-housing brewed during the night. He felt like a girl in her pre-teens, surrounded by her best friends following a night of junk food and talk of their crushes and what they'd wear to their school dance. To top the feeling off, Wallace slid an arm under his pillow to find the page of Arlette's diary he'd fallen asleep with, reading it against the moonlight with the regard he might peruse a lover's confession.

 _August 11th – She's Not Me_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I don't know what's wrong with me…_

 _I'm not that kind of girl…_

 _I don't do these things…_

 _Andrew came back to the house and I tried to talk to him. Just to clear the air, figure out what's happening. But he just ignored me and went to lay down on the only bed in the house. He laid there for a while and I went over to him, he was just laying there on top of the sheets. He looked lifeless, arms at his sides, his legs dangling over the edge. I hadn't thought about all that we'd gone through since we got onto the Trail. How hard of a trip it had been, physically, he was probably exhausted. I was._

 _My legs hurt, I was soaking wet from the rain, and hungry. I was going to leave him alone, but I caught him staring at me. He wasn't asleep, just laying there, staring at me… I went over to him and I could see his eyes were just half-open, but he was watching me. I feel like I saw something in his eyes, his blue blue eyes. I've been thinking about it, but I can't figure out what it was. Something like surrender. But also something like expectation or maybe longing. Andrew's surrender and an expectation of me, maybe. He seemed at peace. Despite the storm that nature created and the one that I felt was brewing between us, he was still. Something took over me. Maybe it was that moment, the place, or the moonlight, separated into blocks by the window designs. Maybe it was his lips, parted and waiting. Or him, lying there, his chest rising and falling naturally, his body unbidden by the mountain of activity our hike expected of us..._

 _It didn't happen like I thought it would._

 _My romance novels were wrong..._

 _Heartbrokenly Yours, Arlette B._

Wallace balled the page in one hand and held Wink to his stomach as he slid off his bed and into the chair at his desk. He brushed away his assignment on egg cycles for his breeding class as he powered on his laptop and without a second thought, ventured to the PokéView app. Wink clawed the desk, taking a spot beside the laptop and made off-key grating sounds until Wallace relented and scratched under his chin.

Eyeing the clock on his desktop, Wallace knew he had a good hour or so until Neo would wake, his internal timer waking up him at six on the nose, and Garret sometime later than that. Twisting in his seat, Wallace found elgyem and spinarak sharing a pile of clothes at the foot of his bed, dead to the world as they snoozed.

Taking the chance to see what was new since he'd last checked PokéView, Wallace saw many of his classmates and professors in his menu for recommended videos as he typed in Andrew's account, an act that felt as self-sabotaging as dying his hair blond and ditching his glasses.

Dozens of video thumbnails spread across the screen in a grid-style display and Wallace dragged his finger over the trackpad, his pointer flying across thumbnails, but quickly focused on the most recent video. The sight of the gilded exterior of Parfum Palace called back memories of Andrew's birthday party two months ago.

Wallace slid open the drawers of his desk and rummaged through each of them until he found a tangled pair of white earbuds. He jammed one end into his laptop and screwed the others into his head and pressed play.

Like most of Andrew's videos the camera shook as his hands fumbled the camera, giving off a shaky sight of the garden and the party guests. As the camera passed groups of people they all turned and shouted their happy birthday wishes to the camera as Andrew panned away and got shots of the garden, the lake, and the palace walls.

In one shot, Andrew swept from side to side, taking in the full length of the palace until he reached the balcony that overlooked the balcony, the camera focusing on Arlan for a beat and then swerved right. Wallace narrowed his eyes as the camera blurred and focused on a figure standing off to the side of the balcony, in the shadows.

Wallace sunk his teeth into the inside of his cheek as he hit the space bar, pausing the video. Distance from the garden to the balcony and Andrew's lack of professional cameraman skills made the shot blurred and far from clear, but Wallace knew Andrew had focused on him on the balcony.

Thumbing the space bar again, a girl's high voice pierced through the party chatter. The camera left the balcony and spun through the crowd, focusing on Azalea in her electric blue dress, white hair with blue streaks in her a ponytail. Wallace listened as she kissed her hands and blew them to the camera and to Andrew's laugh behind the camera as he thanked her.

The orotund and husky disembodied voice of his friend was a blow to the gut that had Wallace slamming the space bar again. He ripped the earbuds out and pressed his fingers into his eyes, Wink letting out a disapproving snarl as the chin scratches stopped.

Easing out of his chair, Wallace crossed the room to his closet and dug through the bottom to find the single bag he'd brought to campus, his duffel. Even the sight of it, the designer name stitched across the front, was foreign to him as he opened it and searched inside for a small box he'd packed away. From the bag, Wallace pulled out a DIY home hair dye kit in the color _espresso_ and tore at the box until it was in shreds and gathered the color tubes. Wallace slammed his laptop shut, grabbed Wink, and headed for the door, a plan forming in his mind as he went along.

* * *

Following a dash across campus and bugging the area director of Rose-Absolute Hall for Azalea's room number and crafting a pathetically vague story, Wallace found himself sitting on Azalea's room, between her knees, as she worked the hair dye across his scalp.

"Again, I really appreciate this," Wallace said as he scratched Wink's back as the water-type sat motionless between his own legs, pleased to have found a patch of sunlight on the floor to bathe in. "You're probably busy getting ready for the dance tomorrow."

"Not at all. I've had my dress, hair, and makeup planned for weeks," Azalea said as she worked her fingers in circles through Wallace's hair. "Tiramisu and I were just doing some dress-up."

Wallace nodded his head as he watched a small white pokémon, with a blue streak going from the top of its head all the way to its tail that held three prominent spikes, dart across the room with two large pink bows fixed on ears. The pachirisu had taken an interest in Wink and Wallace, but had kept its distance, darting in close, but leaped away anytime Wallace made the effort to pet it.

"I'm a little surprised you came to me though," Azalea said. "We don't talk much."

"I couldn't think of anyone else, the blue streaks in your hair, they look nice," he replied, twitching his foot that sent Tiramisu two feet in the air in fright.

"Chi-pa! Chi-pa!" Tiramisu landed and ran in circles, chasing its tail, but paused when it realized it ended up near Wallace's foot again. The electric rodent sniffed at his foot before it leaped and latched onto his sock.

"Thanks," Azalea said. "By the way, what is your natural hair color? I didn't know you dyed it."

Wallace shivered, either from Azalea's desire to know or the glob of dye oozing across the back of his ear. "Blond."

Azalea gasped and clasped the sides of Wallace's head. "I adore blondes," she said.

Wallace snorted, but covered it with a cough as Azalea's pachirisu nibbled on his foot as he wiggled it. He resisted the urge to make a comment geared toward Andrew, but the urge to mention him was too strong, after all, that was his entire plan. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumbled page of Arlette's diary, his true reason for making the trip across the camping with the claims of needing a dye. "Hey, what I saw in the safari, between you and Arlette?" he said, smoothing the page against his lap.

Azalea's fingers went limp on his head as she sighed. "Old news," she said.

"I found something," he said and held the page up for her. Wallace went back to rubbing Wink's back as he listened to Azalea's mumbled reading of the diary entry. In the time it took her to finish, Tiramisu had become disinterested in Wallace's foot and had taken to crawling along his leg and stalking Wink.

"Oh my god, is this her diary?" Azalea asked, her voice high on the verge of laughter. "So she got all pissy cause I started called and thought sleeping with him was going to solve her problems? Now I don't feel bad at all for slapping her."

"You and her dated Andrew at the same time?" he asked, trying to keep his choice of words neutral, as if he'd stumble on some combination of syllables that would expose him as being too invested in the matter.

"I guess," Azalea said, carefree, as the diary page drifted to the floor, the corners stained espresso brown. "Not by choice, obviously. I'm not that kind of girl."

Wallace bit at his lip, tearing off a stretch of skin as he listened to Azalea's words match Arlette's: not that kind of girl. The thought occurred to him that who he knew Azalea and Arlette to be may be products of their time with Andrew. Had he not been the star of Kalos, would the girls even have wasted time fighting over him?

"So you know how I do performances here on campus?" Azalea asked, shattering Wallace out from his thoughts.

"Y-Yeah, I saw you at the bonfire before classes started, you were amazing," he said.

"Thanks. I've done that kind of stuff for years," Azalea said. "I really want to become the Kalos Queen, like, ugh," Azalea's hands went slack on his head as she let out a pregnant sigh, "goals. The stage, the lights, the costumes, the routine, and the applause! I live for that rush. But I've been traveling Kalos for years doing performances here and there, studying when I can, making friends and just having fun, that's when I met Andrew. I think he was still gathering his Kalos badges and we kind of just traveled together for a bit. I didn't think I'd like him as much as I did, but when he lost the league and said he was leaving for other regions I got really sad."

Wallace flinched as he felt a cold glob of dye land on the crown of his head. Azalea's fingers pressed into it as she massaged it through his follicles. "Did you follow him?"

"Nope, should have, but I stayed here," Azalea said. "We kept in touch though, letters, messages, calls. That went on for years and that's kind of how I knew we had something special. I knew he'd probably meet other girls on the road, but how many would be willing to keep up a long distance friendship and looking back on the things we said to each other and the things we shared, I know what we had was real. When he told me he was coming back for his birthday, I was so excited, but he said he couldn't see me until the day of his party."

"I read another part of Arlette's diary, she mentions that," Wallace said. "Andrew said he was coming home early, but wasn't coming back right away and wanted to spend time with her before he came home."

"Home?" Azalea asked. "Are you from Lumiose? I could have sworn someone told me you were from Unova."

"No, yeah, I – I am, I was just saying, you know."

"Yeah," Azalea hummed in agreement. "So the week before his party I started calling, wanting to know what was up, I was just really excited to see him, but I kept getting weird hang-ups and things like that. And like I said, I've traveled Kalos and made friends, I'm connected. I've got friends all over the place and they told me he was getting cozy with some specious girl outside Laverre. So, of course, news spread and because they met first or whatever and then I came along I get a bad reputation as being the other woman. My friends are looking at me differently, wondering why I'm obsessing over a guy who has a girlfriend like I'm sad and desperate."

Wallace dug his fingers into his thighs, wincing as Azalea's fingers dug harder into his scalp every time she mentioned Arlette.

"But after he stopped answering my calls I decided just to wait and as I predicted she didn't show up to his party and I was the one there for the public to see on his arm," Azalea said. "I wish she would have had the nerve to show up, I would have accidentally bumped her and sent her into the pond, maybe a gyarados would have eaten her, all my problems would have been solved then, even though she looks chewy," Azalea said, followed by a nasal laugh at her own pettiness. "He didn't even care that she didn't come, didn't mention her once."

"What do you mean all your problems would have been solved?" he asked, stroking between Wink's scales as he brought the stories from Arlette's diary together with Azalea's recollection.

"We left the party together and went back to his place, for the after party if you know what I mean," Azalea said as she leaned closer to his ear and started singing. "And I think you dooo! Anyway," she coughed. "We talked about his plans now that he was free to do whatever he wanted and he surprised me saying he'd been accepted to Radix and that we'd be attending together in a few week. He said he just had one thing he had to do before he could leave Lumiose."

Wallace swallowed a lump the size of his fist in his throat, his mind flashing to the sight of Andrew in his doorway, the flash drive in his hand, the sheer force and determination brimming in his friend.

"I told him he should take care of it right away so nothing would stop us from leaving. He got so excited and full of energy," Azalea said. "He said he wanted to leave around sunrise. He told me to get my stuff together and be ready to leave when he came back and then he left in a hurry. I waited for hours."

Wallcae's eyes dropped as he heard Azalea's pain in every word she didn't say and how the movements of her hands slowed on his head, working the dye through his hair with tender motions. Another blow landed in his gut as he heard Azalea sniffle behind him, he wanted to turn, but wasn't sure what seeing her face would do to him.

"I spent the morning at his house, pacing the floor, wondering what was taking him so long," she said, in a softer than what she used for Arlette. "I thought he had left to tell Arlette he was breaking things off for good, of course back then I didn't know who she was, I didn't know her name or anything, but I figured he'd left to end it with her, but that she'd done something to keep him around, but then the police came and his father was yelling and crying and I was crying... and yeah."

"I'm sorry, Azalea," Wallace said as he leaned to the side and pressed his head into her hand, a stupid gesture he thought as he did it, something he'd seen someone's furfrou do to their trainer.

"Thanks," she said, her voice wet. "I think the worse part are all the theories. We still don't know what happened after he left the house. It's confusing to keep up with all the theories the police have and all the public opinions. It's like one of the mystery shows, the last time you see someone is so normal you don't think anything of it, but something happens and no one knows anything only the person involved could tell us anything for closure." Azalea worked her fingers back and forth across Wallace's head, massaging his scalp as she paused from working the dye into his hairline. "Us, like I'm part of the family something." Azalea hiccuped out a cry. "I can't imagine what his parents are going through."

"Do you think he's alive?" Wallace asked, his eyes closing involuntarily as the soothing feeling of the head massage took over.

"I couldn't say," Azalea said. "I want to believe, yes, he is, but when I say it out loud, I sound like I'm lying to myself. I would love nothing more than for him to show up in front of me tomorrow, but if he is dead I can't hold on like that, I'll never begin to heal. That probably sounds terrible, like I've given up on him or something."

"No, I get it," he said. Wallace listened to the sound of her stripping the plastic gloves off before she moved off the bed and rounded him, eyeing her work. "How does it look?" he asked.. With a reddened face and glassy eyes, Wallace saw a weakness and emotion present in her face he hadn't seen before, but she looked as cute as ever in her skirt, t-shirt, and sneakers.

"Like someone dunked you in a large jar of chocolate sauce," she said, laughing as she held her hand out. "C'mon, I'll rinse you out in the bathroom."

Careful not to bump Wink or startle Tiramisu, Wallace got to his feet and followed Azalea out of her room and across the hall to one of the hall's shared bathrooms. She led him to one of the middle sinks in the line and like he was a doll, pushed his head into one of the sink basin as she turned on the water.

As cold water rushed over his head and turned warm, Wallace was aware of Azalea talking behind him as her fingers worked through his scalp and across his neck, but under the gush of water he couldn't make out any words. With nowhere else to look, Wallace focused on the door until it opened and Eleanor came in, skidding to a stop as their eyes met. The squeak of a pair of flip-flops caused Azalea to stop working.

"Hey Ellie," Azalea said. "Cute towel."

Wallace's face burned as Eleanor tugged at a light yellow towel with cartoon lighting bolts stitched into it, tightening it across her body and crossing her arms over her chest. "Wallace, this is the girl's bathroom!" she said. Eleanor's eyes took in Azalea and Wallace like a printer scans a document, up and down several times over. Though she was loud, she didn't seem angry, just embarrassed and uncomfortable as her face burned red.

"I uh, um, I'm just – " Wallace stammered, unable to form a complete sentence or take his eyes off Eleanor who seemed glued to the floor as she didn't leave nor make a beeline for the showers.

"Relax," Azalea said, propping herself against Wallace's back. "He's just here for a rinse, not an orgy. Go take your shower."

Eleanor eyed the two of them, her lips pursed like she'd heard a bad joke and tried resisting laughter. She secured her towel again and dipped off around the corner.

"Close your eyes," Azalea said as she angled his head deep into the sink, the sound of water pooling in her hands above his head.

Wallace pinched his eyes shut as Azalea dropped several handfuls of water on his head and scrubbed at his neck as she pulled him up and wiped his forehead before he had a chance to. She grabbed his hand and led him from the bathroom again and back into her room and she left him in the middle of the floor as she grabbed a towel and started drying him off.

As his eyes were clear, Wallace watched Tiramisu running laps around Wink who couldn't have been less interested in the electric-type. As he watched the electric-type circle Wink, he wondered if Wink even knew pachirisu was there.

"I don't think I've ever seen you without your glasses," Azalea said as she unsnapped the smock she'd given him. Azalea scrubbed the side of his head as she circled him and ran the towel along his shoulders and across his back. "Oh!"

Wallace flinched as the towel vanished and her fingers traced along his back, from their placements he knew she'd seen the line scars Chara's meganium had left. Azalea's silence and the delicate touch of her fingertips raised Wallace's skin to bumps, a creeping chilling line sliding down his spine. "It happened in the safari before school started."

"I feel so bad," Azalea said. "I heard about the boy who died that day because of Chara and I heard about Serena's boyfriend, it's awful. Serena is so lucky someone found Nat in time, I don't want anyone to ever have to know what it feels like to lose someone they care about." Azalea's fingers trailed across Wallace's back as she came to his front again, her eyes jittering across his chest, neck, and then to his face.

With each thud his heart made, Wallace felt himself moving closer to Azalea until their bodies met and her hand held the side of his head, angling her head to meet his to make up for their differences in height. As their lips drifted closer and Wallace studied the lines and ridges in the blue of her eyes, the moment shattered into fragments around them with the shrill interruption of a phone ringing.

Azalea coughed into her hand as she spun around and tossed pillows aside on her bed before she uncovered her phone. "Mom, hi!" Azalea croaked into her phone as she fussed with strands of her hand and bounced on her feet.

Wallace grabbed Wink under his belly and collected his shirt and glasses as he stumbled around the room before he darted through the door. Filled with a complex mixture of embarrassment for nearly kissing the girlfriend of his dead best friend and pride for completing his mission to hear about her relationship with Andrew, Wallace wandered the halls of Rose-Absolute Hall before he paused in front of an opened doorway. Stealing a glance inside, he found Kolton running a broom across the tiled floor. Wallace pressed his hand to the doorway before he ran a hand up the door, he'd found Don's room.

"He's not here," Kolton said as he stopped sweeping and turned to face Wallace. "He's parents took him home."

Wallace swallowed down another lump in his throat as Kolton's piercing eyes focused on him, narrowed and to no surprise not happy to see him. "I knew that, I just –"

"So why are you here?" Kolton asked as he made a half-hearted returned to sweeping.

Wallace didn't respond, unable to come up with a good answer, as his attention drifted to something fluttering near the ceiling. A pokémon with two pairs of wings, both orange and tipped with small square-like extensions, flapped around the ceiling before it zipped toward the door and fluttered its wings before Wallace, its large orange eyes taking him in.

"That's Manny, my mothim," Kolton said. "Manny, you're supposed to be dusting."

"Thiii!" The Mothim flapped its wings faster at Wallace before it spun around and flew back to the ceiling and flapped its wings, uselessly, at the ceiling light, giving it little effort.

"Can I ask you a question?" Wallace asked.

"You just did," Kolton quipped.

Wallace rolled his eyes, snorting at Kolton's disdain for him. "Why don't you like me?"

Kolton ran the broom across the floor once more before he propped himself on the handle. "I remember you, I took your phone call before school started while I was doing summer work and you were hella late getting registered, but somehow you managed to slide in."

"So?" Wallace asked, shrugging. "Why do you care? I remember you saying you had a friend that didn't get accepted, that had nothing to do with me."

"You're not a star student, I haven't seen your name on any honor lists," Kolton said. "You don't seem super active in the community, you don't volunteer for anything that I've seen, no special mentions. The only reason people know who you are is because of the safari, because you've got a target on your back. So it seems like the only thing you've got going for you is that you're unlucky."

"Whatever," Wallace waved Kolton off as he turned to leave. "Forget it." The sound of the broom smacking the floor and Kolton's quickened footsteps startled Wallace, thinking the boy might charge him, but when he looked back into the room a flash of light blinded him.

"He'll be back tomorrow," Kolton said.

Blinking and rubbing at his eyes, Wallace glared back into the room to see Kolton lowering a large digital camera. The thought that no pictures of him seemed to exist online caused a brief spark of panic inside him. "What?"

"Don," Kolton said. He clicked a few buttons on his camera, his red brows furrowing as he looked over the display screen. "He'll be back tomorrow for the homecoming dance. i'm sure you wanted to know," he said, eyeing Wallace.

"Okay." Wallace nodded, still dwelling on the fact that aside from his school ID, someone else had taken a picture of him he couldn't take his eyes of the camera, concerned what Kolton might do with his picture.

* * *

Back in the ICO, Wallace twisted the knob to his room and pushed his way inside, startled by the sight of Garret and Arlette standing in the middle of the room. "Hello?" he said, his eyes darting between the two of them, but lingered on Arlette who seemed to do the opposite as she looked everywhere but at him.

"Uh," Garret hummed. "So, I'll see you tomorrow?"

Arlette's head bobbed in an odd pattern as she avoided eye contact with either boy in the room as she made her way to the door. Wallace made little effort to move out of her way and the two bumped against each other as Arlette slipped into the hall and fast walked away from the room.

"That was weird," Garret said as he climbed onto his bed. "We were having a nice conversation and then she got so quiet. She's so shy."

"She's something," Wallace said as he kicked the door shut and carried Wink to the window sill were the water-type liked to balance and sun bathe. Making a loop around the room he picked up elgyem who greeted him with flashing green digits and high pitched beeping. "Why was she here?" he asked, scanning the ceiling and the corners of the room for spinarak who hadn't appeared yet.

"I asked to come and talk about the homecoming dance tomorrow," Garret admitted, shyly, as he flipped open his laptop and tried to cover his words with loud typing.

"And she said yes?" Wallace asked as he dropped onto his bed, stroking elgyem's head slowly.

Garret pursed his lips and nodded, stealing a glance in Wallace's direction. "I'm excited."

"I can tell," Wallace said, looking to his feet. "You look like you want to jump on your bed and tell me all about it. I'm surprised she said yes, not because of you, just because."

"Because of Andrew," Garret said, bringing the name Wallace couldn't bare to say anymore after a morning spent talking to Azalea about him. "Yeah, I know. I didn't think she'd say yes, I don't know if anyone can replace him to her. I feel like i'm overshadowed by him, and he's not even alive..."

Wallace pressed his lips together, hard, to keep from replying as he shifted back on his bed, humming in acknowledgement. "Well, if she said yes, she must like you back."

"But with every news channel running stories on him it's like he's an eclipse over everything." Garret rested his hands on his laptop before he slammed it shut. "I don't want to think about it anymore," he declared.

"Okay." Wallace shrugged and nibbled at his lip as he gave the room another once over for spinarak. "Have you seen my bug?"

Garret hopped off his bed, slipping his feet into a pair of bright yellow deck shoes. "Closet?" he offered before he walked to the mirror and ran a hand through his hair. "Do you want to go to the stadium? They're naming the homecoming king and queen and there's going to a battle? Unless you have plans."

"I'm free," Wallace said as elgyem climbed onto his shoulder and he opened his closet doors to find spinarak dangling from a vacant hanger.

* * *

"Is it weird being back here?" Garret asked as he and Wallace climbed the bleachers.

As his last memory of Styrax Stadium involved watching as the field burn up courtesy of Johnny's volcarona, the sight of lush green grass and a large chunk of the school's student body chatting innocently in the stands took Wallace by surprise. "A little," he said. With one arm securing snacks and the other holding Wink, Wallace led Garret to the near top of the bleachers to a vacant spot near the aisle, perfect for making a quick escape should the occasion arise. "It's only been a month, but this place looks as good as new."

"I think Neo told me the school's insurance handled all the repairs," Garret said as he reached up and took some of the snacks they'd bought off Wallace's hands. "New turf field and they replaced some of the burned stone and made some renovations to the locker rooms."

Just like that, the university painted over and removed the physical reminders of that day, like the interior of the clinic had been. The only thing that remained was Nat, whose scars from that day would never fade. The phantom memory of that night crept up Wallace's spine, making him shiver, as he glanced toward the press box where Chara had hid, but rather than dwell on the memory, his attention shifted to two girls marching up to back of the box.

Professor Oakburn stomped up the seats of the bleachers, looking like an old student in her jeans and baggy shirt. Her arm hung back behind her as she dragged a girl up with her, by her licks of white-blonde hair, Wallace recognized her as Willow, the girl that'd made the scene at the PRESS PLAY meeting. The sight of the two sisters together caused the memory of the stadium fire to burn out as he focused on the sisters, the youngest earning most of his attention as Professor Oakburn dragged her to the top row of seats and held her against the press box wall.

"Switch me seats," Wallace said, already up and shuffling past Garret.

"Oh okay, hey wait, no!" Garret gasped as their box of popcorn fell off his lap and spilled over the seat. "No, our popcorn."

Wallace whipped his student ID out and prodded Garret's chest with it. "Go buy some more?" he said, half paying attention to Garret as he focused on the sisters. He listened to Garret getting up off the seat and stomping down the aisle before he inched further down the bench until he caught bits of the sister's conversation.

"You must be insane!" Sienna said, her hands running through her hair like there was a bug-type trapped in her blonde locks. "You can't go around talking like that! The Andrew Gates case is serious and it means a lot to the students and staff. He could have been one of your classmates. I don't want to hear any more about you and this private video of his, do you understand me?"

Wallace narrowed his eyes as Willow tipped her head down and nodded slowly, her hands folded in front of her waist. He couldn't help but scoff at her shy demeanor, far from the girl who made boisterous claims at the meeting, and even Professor Oakburn seemed out of character as she snapped at her sister.

Professor Oakburn paced the bench, still running hands through her hair and wiping at her face before she stopped, pressed her back to the guard rail, and let out a long breath. "Mom and dad are gone," she said.

Wallace watched as Willow's expression changed, the faux sorrow she'd held onto during her sister's speech had faded as the girl's eyes narrowed at her sister and her mouth twitched.

"We're all we've got," Professor Oakburn said, reaching out and touching Willow's shoulder. "Even though you're grown up now and I don't have you in any of my classes, I'm still a teacher and still your big sister, I can't have you starting trouble like this. People are all worked up about the dance tomorrow because of your claim."

"They should be," Willow said as she averted her gaze and looked to the field.

"Promise me you'll keep away from this," Professor Oakburn said as she stood before Willow and held both of her shoulders. "No more talk about hacking and secret videos. Focus on your grades and doing what would have made our parents proud. Deal?" Professor Oakburn held her fist up in front of her sister, her pinky up.

Willow eyed the extended pinky before she locked her own around it and the sister's gave each other's arms a good shake. "Deal."

Wallace watched Professor Oakburn drape her arm over her sister's neck before someone landed on the bench beside him. Whipping around he saw Eleanor and Neo sitting beside him with Garret perched on the edge of the bench. "Hello."

"Who're you looking at?" Eleanor asked, straightening up to peer over his head. "I called your name, but you were focused on something else."

"I thought I saw a fletchling," Wallace said, waving his hand absently through the air.

"So, did you boys enjoy your slumber party?" Eleanor asked, her cheeks rounding up as she gave the boys a big goofy grin. "Did you stay up late talking about girls? Did you eat junk food? Did you trash the senior you don't like? Did you brush each other's hair?" she asked as she pulled her brown-ish locks over one shoulder and ran an imaginary brush through them.

"St-Stop!" Neo coughed into his fist before he adjusted his glasses and turned his attention to his tablet. "Don't be silly, boys don't have slumber parties. I just spent the night in their room."

"We did eat a lot of junk food though!" Garret piped in, grinning as widely as Eleanor.

"Yeah?" Eleanor replied, leaning across Neo to clasp hands with Garret. "Did you watch bad movies in your pajamas?"

"Yeah!" Garret cheered.

"That's enough!" Neo blurted out, breaking Garret and Eleanor's contact as he twisted the strand of hair on the side of his head that never seemed to lie flat. "Don't make it sound like we're twelve year old girls."

"I'm sorry," Eleanor cooed as she leaned into Neo and playfully swiped at his tablet.

An uncontrollable smile spread across Wallace's face watching Neo and Eleanor flirt with each other, Neo feigning annoyance as Eleanor fiddled with his tablet. "You're going to homecoming together, right?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Eleanor said, though her tone said otherwise. "Serena is making me go. Whether I want to or not, whether I had a date or not. She's head of the dance committee and is probably going to be named Homecoming Princess," Eleanor said with a nod to the field

"Oh?" Wallace asked. A stage stood on the edge of field, outside the arena makers, covered in shimmering ribbons and papers that made the stage look like it belonged in a beauty pageant. Several people gathering around the stage, passing along papers and testing a microphone by the stage.

A face Wallace hadn't seen since the back to school bonfire, Professor Stratton and her blue hair that seemed unprofessional, stepped up to the mic and tapped it a few times before her voice echoed across the stadium. "Thank you everyone for coming out today to witness the crowning of this year's Homecoming King and Queen as well as our Prince and Princess of Homecoming." Professor Stratton held her hand out as another woman handed her several envelopes.

The bleachers filled with lukewarm applause and cheers and Wallace participate with a slow clap as he scanned the heads of the students around him, wondering where Willow had snuck off too.

"The votes had been collected all month long and without further ado, our Homecoming Queen is Sera Wick," Professor Stratton read from one of her envelopes to the crowd's weak applause, though some boys at the bottom did begin stomping their feet.

Wallace watched a chubby girl come trotting from out of sight and climb the steps onto the stage where a man greeted her and held a crown out for her. Sera curtseyed to the crowd as the man placed the crown on her head and she bounced across the stage to stand at the end.

"It should come to the surprise of no one that due to his efforts around campus as well as the tragic events that befell him while trying to protect the campus, that Nasturtium Freelily is our Homecoming King."

As if she'd predicted a low applause, Professor Stratton clapped into her mic, though she didn't need to as the crowd roared in approval and cheer for Nat. The man with the crown on stage stood beside Sera, holding the crown in front of him as Professor Stratton opened up the next envelope.

"And our Homecoming Prince and Princess, who will take each other on in our ceremonial battle are... Travis Fahn and Serena Saint-Mars," Professor Stratton announced, using her voice to add flare to the rather dull ceremony.

Still the crowd erupted in another round of applause and cheering as Travis sprinted out onto the field and bounded up the steps. Serena followed him at a much slower pace, waving and blowing kisses to the crowd that only grew in excitement at her appearance. She ascended the steps and claimed her crown and took her place beside Travis.

"Wonderful," Professor Stratton said as she looked over the Homecoming Court. "Now, Serena and Travis, if you're ready, we'd love to witness your battle."

Wallace straightened up men climbed onto the stage and swarmed on Serena and Travis, the sound of shuffling and microphone static filling the stadium. In the far corner the scoreboard lit up with the screen in the middle showing the view of the stadium.

"How does a double battle sound?" Travis asked, the camera focusing on the angles of his face as he smoothed back his ink black hair and smirked at Serena.

Wallace watched the Homecoming Princess flip her dark hair and walk off the stage, heading in toward the middle of the stadium as she pulled two Poké Balls out of her pockets. "Fine by me," she said.

"I'll go easy on you if you want," Travis said, winking a green eye at her as he chucked two balls onto the field. The camera panned back to take in a froslass and luxio that appeared before Travis. The froslass floated around in a circle, the camera picking up bits of frost coating the grass under it as the luxio stretched out and plopped down on the ground, looking overdue for a nap.

"Do what you need to," Serena said as she tossed the balls out in style. "Not taking me seriously only means this battle will end quicker."

Two monumental pokémon appeared on the field before Serena. The arrival of an aurorus and tyrantrum took the camera operator by surprise who couldn't zoom out fast enough to take in their size.

"Oh," Travis said before he let out a nervous laugh. "I heard rumors you liked to collect fossil pokémon. They don't seem like your style."

"What is my style?" Serena asked, arms folded over her chest. "Fairies? Maybe a dainty gardevoir or something soft like a jumpluff?"

"Alright, alright." Travis shrugged and held his arms up in surrender. "You made your point. Nieve, start with a powder snow, aimed at the tyrantrum."

The camera focused froslass in its sights as it swirled into the air and let its arms drape at its sides. During its graceful movements a gust of wind blew across the stadium and with it flecks of snow flurries that flew toward Serena's side, though as the camera found her face she didn't seem fazed.

"Let's make this quick," Serena said as she snapped her fingers, the small action causing a slight change in her pokémon's posture. "Ty, sweetie, eat your berry and launch forward with head smash. Let's take out froslass with one blow. Aurorus, use blizzard and show them what a real ice move looks like!"

"Does she know blizzard is going to hit her dragon too?" Garret asked, whispering down the bench line.

"I told you before, Serena is from one of the top families in Unova, she's no dummy," Neo said, unable to keep up with himself as he looked from the field to his tablet.

Wallace turned his attention back to the screen as tyrantrum pulled a berry from a pouch strapped to its body and dropped it on the ground before it bent and devoured it, along with a chunk of the turf. As it swallowed, which the camera picked up, waves of blue and white light coated tyrantrum as it kicked at the ground and aimed its head down. Beside it, the sails of Serena's aurorus flapped as another gust of wind to rival the froslass's picked up. While small flurries came from behind froslass large and easily visible flakes flew from behind aurorus.

Tyrantrum roared and then charged forward, its massive feet quaking the ground as it charged toward Travis's team. Aurorus let out a high wail as the power of its blizzard increased, an actual snowstorm forming on the field in a matter of seconds that the camera couldn't see through. As if someone dropped a glass box over the stadium, the snow from aurora started instantly at one end and stopped abruptly behind Travis and coated everything between with a fresh layer of snow.

As the flurries died away the camera struggled to focus on one side of the battlefield, catching Serena's smug face for one second before it focused on the mammoth sized snow figure that was tyrantrum before it focused on Travis, shaking snow from his hair and shoulders as his luxio leaped through the snow mounds.

"Nieve?" Travis asked, scanning the snowy field.

A loud snort came from the snow mound before it moved and tyrantrum's shaking body emerged, knocking snow clods from its body, seemingly unaffected by the ice attack. The fossil pokémon regarded Travis with a soft grumble before it walked back across the field to Serena, leaving behind a body sized gap in the snow field that revealed the motionless body of the froslass.

"She used the cover of the blizzard to attack froslass," Eleanor said. "And tyrantrum ate an yache berry before to keep him from being knocked out."

"Still, the tyrantrum must be hurting," Neo said.

Wallace wet his lips as he looked to the screen again, sure enough snow and ice had collected around tyrantrum's joints and crystals gathered across its snout, despite Serena's confidence in the combo, the full brunt of the blizzard had done a number on tyrantrum.

"Well?" Serena asked, shrugging with a massive grin across her face. "Think you can beat me with a pokémon that I'm not at all weak to?"

Travis rubbed at the back of his head and ran his tongue over his teeth. "No, I don't suppose so."

"Is that a forfeit?" Professor Stratton asked as she dashed to the microphone.

Travis shrugged, but did say anything as he recalled his luxio and the flattened froslass. Serena clapped gleefully as she rushed toward her pokémon, giving them hugs around their massive legs before she recalled them and kicked through the snow as she rushed to the stage. Claiming the microphone from Professor Stratton, Serena cleared her throat into the mic. "Thank you all for coming out today for this short little ceremony, I hope to see each and everyone one of your at the dance tomorrow for a night we'll never forget!"

Wallace clapped as the students around him roared out support for Serena and her victory, but rather than watch the scoreboard show Serena admiring her crown, Wallace found Willow in the crowd as the girl stood and clapped for Serena. If her claims were true, Andrew's video would play in less than a day, and despite Izumi's sleuthing, it didn't seem like they had a plan to stop it.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty Five

* * *

 ** _AN:_** As of this chapter we've passed 200k words! Thanks so much for reading over this past year and for your support.

 **Question of the Chapter #24:** Do you think Willow will follow through with her plan to release the video or will something come up?


	26. Homecoming

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Twenty Six – Homecoming**

 _The lawn is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return  
_ _Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn  
_ _This sad intangible who grieve and yearn – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

XFollowing throngs of young men and women dressed in pressed suits and glittery gowns, Wallace stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie as his sneakers slapped the pavement, slicked wet by a bout of cloudburst earlier in the day.

Wallace clenched his cell phone tighter the closer he came to the Origin Center. Despite having no desire to attend, Wallace found himself drawn to the homecoming dance along with a group of girls in gowns that made them look like cupcake toppers, the thundering of electronic notes pumping from the building beckoning them.

Checking his phone again to no messages, Wallace sighed and paced in a circle until he forced himself to keep walking toward the entrance. No one greeted him at any of the four automatic doors that led into the lobby so Wallace headed in. His feet disturbed a bed of balloons in the school colors as he found a place, out of the way, to wait. Giving his phone another look, hoping Izumi's name would come on the screen, Wallace folded his arms and propped himself against one of the oval pillars that supported the indoor balcony as he watched his classmates saunter through, leaving paths in the layer of balloons, as they headed for the gymnasium.

"Sorry, I'm late!"

Wallace craned back, expecting to find some sweaty and distraught senior apologizing to his date, but instead it was Izumi who came bounding through the door, a long black dress bag held high. "Why are you here?" he asked, his eyes sizing Izumi up before he scanned the lobby, though no one seemed to be paying them any attention. "I told you to call me when you had something. We have to stop this video from being played."

Izumi hunched over, hands on his knees, as he sucked in air. "Just hear me out," he wheezed, wincing as he thrust the dress bag out to Wallace and nodded toward the bathrooms. "In there."

Flaring his nostrils and giving the lobby another look, Wallace crossed over to the opposite wall and pushed into the men's room. Straining to hear, it seemed that the H shaped bathroom was vacant.

Izumi followed him in and slammed the door shut, flipping the lock behind him. "Alright, so game plan?" he asked as he tossed the bag to Wallace.

"I don't have one, that's why I hired you!" Wallace growled as he laid the bag across one of the sink counters and unzipped it. At first glimpse he thought the bag was empty, the interior as black as the outside, but upon feeling inside Wallace pulled out a black tuxedo jacket along with a vest, tie, slacks, socks, and a bowtie. "What the hell?" Wallace jiggled the bag, two large lumps at the bottom bumping against his legs. "Are there shoes in here? What is going on?"

"Cinderella, it's time to go the ball," Izumi said, showing all his teeth in a wide grin.

"How does this help?" Wallace asked, shaking his fist with the bowtie between his fingers. "Somehow Willow has the video and she's going to show it and I have no clue what's on it and why she has it and you brought me a suit." Wallace dropped the tuxedo accessories back into the back and hung his head as he stretched out his neck. "My head hurts."

"Put it on and let me explain what the situation is," Izumi said, hands clasped in front of his chest.

"You want me to wear this?" Wallace asked.

"Yes, you're going to the dance," Izumi said. "I've done my research on you, Wally, and I know that you have not lived any kind of life stuck in the bell tower Arlan kept you in. Do you even know how to dance?"

"I started taking lessons when I was six, I stopped last summer," Wallace said under his breath, though the tiled room echoed every word. "How does this help?" he asked, looking to Izumi. "The video, it could be anything."

"Exactly," Izumi said, dropping his hands on Wallace's shoulders. "Anything. So why are we expecting it to be bad?"

"I talked to Azalea yesterday, Andrew's other girlfriend. She was with him after his birthday party before he vanished. She said he was determined to do something when he left her," Wallace said.

Izumi shrugged and leaned against the wall as he made a show out of cleaning his ears. "Is that supposed to mean something to me? As I recall when I came to you asking for more information about the night Andrew disappeared you brushed me off. I've put together a lot that you haven't told me, but there's still a few hours missing from my timeline."

"Unless the video is a sex tape or something, it has to be one he made before he came to my house," Wallace said. "And I know what he came to my house to do. So you have to do something! Bring Sid here and have him kidnap Willow or something."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Izumi said, waving his hands in front of him. "You're getting all paranoid and high strung on me again. Put on the suit and let me explain what I've been up to for the past few days. Besides, if we stay in this bathroom with the door locked for much longer someone is going to come knocking and that's gonna be one awkward exit we're gonna have to make."

Wallace sighed as he snatched the dress bag from the sink and dipped into one of the stalls. Ignoring the horrors of undressing in a public bathroom, Wallace made quick work of dressing and found himself taking delight in slipping on remnants of his old life: designer dress socks, pressed slacks, tailored dress shirt, vest, jacket, and polished black shoes. As he left the stall he fastened a pair of cuff links he found in the pockets into place and adjusted his bowtie.

Izumi greeted him with a whistle as he sat on the sink and gave Wallace a soft round of applause. "Boy blunder has returned," he said. "But you might want to put your glasses back on, even with your recent dye job, wearing Lumiose's finest it's hard not to see you as the heir to Kalos."

Wallace nodded as he approached the sinks and focused on himself in the mirror. Despite the hair, with the discount clothing out of the way he couldn't help but see his old life reflected back at him. "I'm dressed, now what?" Savoring the moment, Wallace slipped his thick rimmed glasses on slowly and adjusted the tux.

"So, this whole thing started with some anonymous hint that someone dropped that the video even existed right?" Izumi asked.

"That anonymous hint goes here. Her name is Shannon," Wallace said as he rubbed his temples, reminding himself that Shannon had become a big a problem as Willow. "She worked for my father at some point and noticed the private video had gone up, she mentioned it and the news spread."

"Correct, and without the approval of Andrew's parents the video cannot be played through official channels," Izumi added as he pretended to check an invisible watch on his wrist. "And as of two hours ago, neither Charles or Carrie have given their permission. So the video cannot be shown on the news or any credible station hoping to stay in business, which means the only one it's going to be played is by an unofficial channel."

"You're telling me things I already know," Wallace groaned as he kept stealing glances at himself in the mirror. He wondered what his entrance to the dance would be like and if anyone would notice him.

"My point in mentioning that is that you said the Willow girl plans on showing the video during homecoming. Well, no matter how tech savvy she thinks she is it's hard for anyone who isn't a professional to broadcast something like that region wide," Izumi said. "So my bet is that she only plans on showing it on campus, for whatever reason. Which means she either has to be inside the IT department to do it or is somehow going to play the video from inside the dance. Her phone, for example, she could connect it to the televisions and broadcast the video."

"So we know where she'll be when she tries to play it," Wallace said, his eyes focused on a random spot on the counter as the gears in his mind clicked into place. "We can stop her."

"Yes," Izumi said with the snap of his fingers. "If she's not at the dance we know she's somewhere where she can broadcast, probably somewhere she has no right being and we can get a professor or chaperone involved. If she is inside the dance, that's where you come in, if you see her with anything that looks like a phone or anything, her Pokédex, I don't care, get it out of her hand. Step on it, drop it in the punch bowl, slip it down your pants, do whatever it takes to keep her away from it. You came alone tonight right?" Izumi asked as he slid off the counter and unlocked the bathroom door, peering outside.

"Yeah," Wallace said. "Neo and Garret left ahead of me, I didn't say I was coming."

"Perfect, then your best bet on keeping Willow from playing the video is to be her date." Izumi brushed Wallace's shoulders and pushed him toward the door. "Dance with her, leave the dance with her, keep her distracted."

"You've got my number, call me if you need something," Izumi said as he rushed back through the bathroom and collected Wallace's street clothes. "I'm going to hang around campus pretending to be a random alumni taking a trip down memory lane."

Wallace watched students spill out from the dance, girls hanging onto each other as they staggered in one long line toward the ladies room and boys snapping pictures with each other until the purple and blue glow from the dance room.

Gliding across the lobby, balloons parting beneath him, Wallace stepped under a wave of streamers that adorned the entry and into the dance. A grand transformation had taken place in the gymnasium with streamers and balloons that covered every inch of the steel frame ceiling. Flashing club lights cast blue and violet beams across the room, basking the entire gym in a cool hue that complemented the thumping baseline that had students gathered in the middle of the floor dancing to. The bottom rows of bleachers on each side of the gym acted as seats for those unwilling to dance and tables, draped in school colors, held snacks and drinks for the students.

"Wallace!"

Spinning on his heels, Wallace found Cole standing behind a drink stand in a white t-shirt and dark slacks. "Hi?" he asked as he migrated uneasily toward the table. Three glass punchbowls laid in front of Cole with mountains of blue plastic cups surrounding them.

"Thirsty?" Cole asked as he filled a cup before Wallace could answer.

Wallace nodded as he took the cup and pressed his lips to the rim, but didn't drink. Instead he took a moment to study Cole, to remind himself that the boy serving drinks was the same one that made Ben pee himself in the safari several weeks ago. Under the dance lights Cole's skin shone like bronze and his gold hazel eyes seemed to pierce the dim settings as he watched him fake drinking.

"C'mon, drink, it's a party," Cole said as he reached over and pushed on the bottom of Wallace's cup.

Fearful of spilling on himself, Wallace gulped the punch, a bitter taste burning the back of his tongue and throat as he finished. Wallace coughed, dropping the cup on the floor, and worsened the burn in his throat that made his eyes water. "What was that?" he rasped, the taste of tainted berries slathered across his tastebuds.

"Punch," Cole said, his eyes large and shining under the lights. "With a little Cole magic," he added as he lifted his own cup and took a long sip.

Watching Cole drink, his eyes never blinking or straying from him, Wallace fished a guess Cole was possibility insane, in a fun way. "Magic, huh?" he asked as he leaned over the punch bowls and inhaled.

"What's a party without a little magic?" Cole asked, shrugging as he filled his own cup and grabbed a new cup off the stack and filled it, sliding it across the table for Wallace.

Wallace eyed the cup and Cole, who grinned and stuck his tongue out. Wallace relented and he picked his cup up and started sipping.

"Is _magic_ code for alcohol?"

Almost spitting his drink out, Wallace wiped at his mouth as Serena leaned over the table, her dark hair practically purple and her red thigh length dress shining under lights. "Se-Serena, we weren't –"

"Relax, I don't care," she said as she squeezed his shoulder as she rounded the table. "The chaperones couldn't care less what we do." Serena leaned against the table and pointed across the dance.

Following her arm, Wallace found Professor Sutcliffe and an older woman, presumably his wife, dancing behind a snack table. Professor Stratton was also locked in the embrace of a man as well as Professor Oakburn. Professor McCloud and Xan were dancing comically close to a group of students while Professor Till and Summers stood by, chatting to each other.

Serena sighed as she gazed over the room. "I've thrown an incredible dance, one that will go down in the history of homecomings, but I'm leaving," she said as she dipped her pinky into one of the punch bowls and licked her nail. "Gross," she said, her eyes flicking to Cole.

"What kind of Homecoming Princess leaves the dance she throws?" Cole asked, shrugging like a child and spilling some of his drink under Serena's stare.

"The kind that misses her boyfriend," Serena said as she backed away from the table and headed to the door. "It's not fun if Nat is stuck in the clinic with all those hag nurses." Serena kissed her hand before she waved to the boys and vanished into the lobby.

"As interesting as I am," Cole said, dragging his hands across his chest to drive home his point. "I don't expect you to stand here all night, go find something to dance with, preferably something in a low-cut dress."

Wallace turned to the dance that pulsed with energy as a new song started and the crowd in the middle of the gym grew thicker as couples and groups gathered for one big dance crowd. Eyes drifting from the center of the room, Wallace found Garret and Arlette slow dancing, despite the song calling for everything but. Near them, Eleanor and Neo moved slightly faster as they twirled between two snack tables, yards from the main dance crowd.

Following the line of tables, Wallace found Travis, dressed in a white shirt and dark vest, spinning Tempest under his arm as they danced.

Making his way around the edge of the gym, eyes peeled for Willow, Wallace watched the dance mob. The mass of bodies near the center looked like one large moving figure, but near the edges he saw students dancing in small packs. He found Persia, dressed down in a nice suit rather than a sequined dressed, as she seemed to have found the perfect spot on the floor. One club light remained focused on her and people orbited her, the small group moving as synthpop beats and sultry lyrics urged the students to read each other's _body language_. He watched Calvin emerge from the main group and take claim spot place before Persia, their bodies molding through the songs' last verse.

As the pop beats slowed and what took over was a crooning singer's voice, the groups broke apart and reformed for the slow song, though not everyone had a partner. Wallace watched many from the main group wander away toward the snack tables, suddenly in need of a drink.

He offered reassuring and nonjudgmental smiles to them as he moved further from the tables and found himself walking the line of benches, passing students who were dressed for class rather than a dance. As the music swelled near its finish Azalea emerged from between two tables and practically ran him over.

"Sorry!" she gasped. "I saw you come in! I'm so glad you're here! You look amazing!" she said, gripping his arm. "C'mon and dance with me!" Azalea snatched Wallace's cup from him and gulped the rest of Cole's magic party punch and tugged him away from the wallflower bench.

Fresh from the dance floor, Azalea looked flushed and effortlessly alluring in a revealing lace dress and heels that practically erased their height difference, Wallace resisted the urge to fight back as she dragged him onto the floor as the beats of a new song started. Shuffling through the crush of bodies, Wallace found himself and Azalea pressed against other students as the crowd moved as one.

The music pulsed with minimalist beats and soft drops and Wallace felt ridiculous trying to dance while minding the flying limbs and bodies of his classmates, but found his hips swaying in time with Azalea's. As the music grew louder, Wallace internalized the beat, feeling it hum through his bones as he danced with Azalea, their bodies shifting closer with each bar.

Catching glimpses through the mass of bodies, Wallace found a head of white-blonde hair and Willow's face blue and purple face in the crowd gyrating in a pastel blue dress that reflected the strobe lights well. Grabbing Azalea and carving through the crowd, Wallace moved closer to Willow, making a bubble for the three of them as they fell back into the rhythm.

"Hi!" Azalea screamed, though it was barely heard above the music as she swirled in circles, her hips knocking from side to side with each beat of the drum as she danced on Willow.

"She's friendly," Willow said, her head draped on Wallace's shoulder as her her upper body moved to the beat.

Inhaling, he found the familiar scent of Cole's punch on her breath. "Yeah," he said into her ear as Azalea seemed to fade out of their dance equation as he focused on Willow.

The crowd swayed to the right, everyone's body moving like slaves to the rhythm before they regained formation. Wallace moved closer to Willow, her hair falling free over her face that often concealed one of her eyes. Azalea shimmied around them, dancing behind Willow and grinding her body against the girl while Wallace worked against her front, their hands grasping and exploring each other to the point Wallace wasn't sure who was who.

"I know what you want," Willow said, her lips brushing Wallace's ear as her hands found his lapels.

"What?" he whispered.

"I heard you in the bathroom, talking to someone," Willow said, her words slurred and her voice heavy. "Talking about me and the video and I know you're friends with that geek with the baby computer attached to his arm." Willow leaned back and rolled her eyes toward the crowd. "Is that why you're dancing on me? You think you're going to get the video from me and post it first? Think I'm carrying it on a flash drive or something and you're going to pickpocket it?" Willow asked as her hands roamed, one slipping inside Wallace's jacket and she playfully prodded the inner pocket while her other hand slid down his side and groped his pocket.

"No! No, no, no," Wallace said, trying to keep moving to the rhythm as Willow had, despite her words catching him off guard. "I don't care about posting the video, no."

"Sure," she slurred. "You don't care, yeah I'll believe that. And what makes you so special?"

"What makes _you_ so special?" he fired back. "You said you don't care either, but you want to post it."

"To put an end to it!" she said. "I'm so sick of hearing his name, Andrew," she said, the way a bully would mock their victim. "I think when people die they should stay dead and not have every piece of their personal life dragged through the media."

"So why hold onto the video?" he asked. "Why post it?"

"If I don't, someone else will!" Willow said, rolling her eyes. "And if I do it, it's for the right reasons, to put an end to the theories and all the conspiracies and all the big business bullshit. I'm doing it for the right reason, these other... followers, they just want their time in the limelight by talking about Andrew."

"Have you watched it?" Wallace asked, his pace slowing as the song changed into something more instrumental with less energy.

"I told you, I don't care," Willow said, smirking as she pried Wallace's hands off her and detached herself from Azalea. "Thanks for the dance, if you'll excuse me I've got to check my network strength."

Wallace moved to follow her as she slipped into the crowd, but Azalea falling onto him stopped him as he caught her. "Are you okay?"

"Water," she groaned. "I need water. Wallace, the moon is spinning. Pff! The moon," she giggled. "I mean the room, the room is minning, spinning, whatever."

"Okay, let's find a seat," Wallace said as she held Azalea, her short legs tangling as she struggled to remain vertical as they pushed out from the crowd. Guiding Azalea toward the bench, Wallace sat her down and propped her back against the bleacher before he took a seat beside her. "You okay?"

Azalea bobbed her head and shut her eyes. "Tired. I danced too hard out there, I shut it down out there."

Wallace giggled, high and girl-like before he got to his feet and found the nearest drink table and grabbed a bottle of water and another cup of punch. Returning to Azalea he found her lying on her side on the bench, her clunky black heels crossed at the ankles as she swung her legs through the air. "I got you water," he said, twisting the cap off for her.

"Did you know he loved to dance?" Azalea asked as she made a weak attempt for the bottle of water and placed it on the ground.

"Hm?" Wallace asked, mid-gulp, Cole's punch getting less and less disgusting with every mouthful.

"Andrew, he loved to dance," Azalea whined. "I know I said I wanted to be able to move on at some point, but so many things remind me of him and to think he might really be dead... it hurts."

Wallace finished his cup and laid a hand on Azalea's back, rubbing in circles as he listened to her faint cries. "I'm sorry," he said as he looked at his empty cup. As he thought about licking up the last drops, Cole swooped by and swapped his cup for one filled to the brim.

"No empty cups!" Cole announced as he punted the empty plastic cup into the bleachers to the applause of many.

Grinning, Wallace chugged the new cup, but paused halfway as his stomach churned and he thought he might spit up, but rather than stop he decided on sipping slowly.

The sound of balloons popping startled the crowd and the gym filled with gasps as heads turned toward the entrance where a boy stood with his hands gripping the doorframe. "It's happening!"

As if the fire alarm had gone off, the gymnasium emptied as students sprinted to the doors and poured into the lobby. Wallace stood and crouched in front of Azalea whose eyes had closed, her mouth opening and closing as she napped. "Azalea, are you coming?" he asked, nearly falling over, unable to balance on the balls of his feet. Without a response, Wallace shot up, too quickly, and stumbled toward the exit, noting the gym had practically cleared out except for Willow who was fast walking from the opposite side. "You did it," he said.

"I didn't do anything!" she shrieked as she shook her phone in the air. "I wasn't ready to send it yet! Someone must have hacked me!" she cried. "No!"

Falling through the doorway, Wallace bounced off the back of one student and fell into the brick wall that he slinked down as he followed the glow of a television screen hanging off a wall. Several students stood in silence below the screen, mouths agape and eyes wide as a news channel ran a special bulletin announcing the footage of the video.

"Just a few moments ago we received the clip from Andrew Gates's personal PokéView account and a phone call from Andrew's parents who have already viewed the video, and given up their permission to play it for you now," a blonde woman behind a desk said as a box by her head enlarged swallowed her.

The black box changed in hue, the black becoming a dark grey before blue took over the screen and audio pumped from the television. Wallace turned to find several televisions in the lobby all turned to the same channel and every student standing below them, transfixed to the screens.

Wallace listened to the fumbling of hands around a camera, a sound that caused his throat to clog before Andrew's ashen face appeared on screen as he held the camera down in front of him. The lobby came to life with gasps and cries and shrieks as Andrew looked left and right from his camera.

"Hi," he said as he gave the camera a wide smile. "My name is Andrew Gates and I'm standing outside the home of Arlan Pearce." Andrew changed the camera's angle until it was level with his face and he showed the face of Wallace's home, the front door dark. "I'm uh about to go inside and expose Arlan Pearce for his crimes of extortion," he said as he brought a hand up and shook a flash drive for the camera to see.

Andrew wet his lips as he looked around him again, apparently startled by every sound of the city. "This video is my insurance," he said, his voice quiet before he rubbed at his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Andrew's hand stayed on his face for a moment, his lips trembling and when his hand fell always his glassy and tear filled eyes were plain to see.

"If you're watching this, if anyone is watching this, it means I wasn't able to delete it and uh – it means... it means that I entered the Pearce home, but never left." Andrew turned, giving the camera a sight of street lights behind him as he faced the Pearce's townhouse. Andrew's chin quivered, the subtle shaking visible on screen before he wiped at his eyes as tears spilled down his cheeks. "God... The man you know Arlan to be is not who he really is. Okay?"

Andrew's face disappeared from sight and instead a view of his sneakers appeared on screen while sniffling and shuffling could be heard behind the camera. After minutes of his feet, Andrew turned the camera back on him, his eyes red as he swiped at snot under his nose. Andrew smiled at the camera before he finger combed his hair and wiped at his eyes again. "This could be my last video ever, I can't look crazy," he said, laughing. "Um, if I can't delete this, if I don't come out, if I go missing... If I die, find Wallace Pearce, okay? Find Wallace." Andrew nodded to the camera before he looked to the sky and back to the camera. "Arlan, he likes to step on the little people and make them feel like they don't matter and like they are easily forgotten. I know if something happens to me, a lot of you would want to know what happened and would want justice for me. But Wallace, he's my best friend and if there's anything I trust more than anything it's him. He won't let his father get away with making me disappear. Find Wallace." Andrew nodded as his eyes darted over the screen and the sound of hands against the camera came from the television before the screen went black.

The television faded to complete black until the box shrank and the paled face of the blonde woman came back on screen. The line was dead for several seconds before the woman seemed to reanimate and cough and fiddle with items on her desks. "Sorry, excuse me," she said as she turned from the camera and wiped her eyes, but then stood out of her chair and rushed off set.

The camera panned and spun on the set before another desk with a man behind it camera into view. He coughed into his hand as the camera focused on him before he started to speak, but as he started talking sound faded from Wallace's ears.

A painful knot tightened in Wallace's gut as color vanished from the lobby. The once colorful balloons that decorated the floor faded to black as Wallace watched the students around him come to life. Their mouths stretched open wider, the veins in their necks bulging as they faced each other and seemed to scream, roar actually, at each other.

With slurred and laggard movements, Wallace left the lobby, his feet carrying him down a seemingly endless hallway that took him past the indoor track until he was at a back door. The tightness of his stomach caused him to clench his jaws and he fought the urge to vomit as he pushed the door's bar and stumbled outside.

Fresh air only agitated his stomach as he stumbled from a stone platform behind the building down a flight of steps and onto the beach that led to the bay waters in a number of yards. Sound slowly bled back into Wallace's world with the crush of waves and the cry of flying-types somewhere above him. A voice calling his name caused Wallace to look back and he found Don staggering from the building, gripping the railing for support as he tripped down onto the beach.

While focused on Don's clumsy steps, Wallace hit a rock and fell over, earning him a mouthful of sand. He dug his arms and feet through the sand in an attempt to get his balance as he heard Don fall into the sand behind him. "Don, go, you can't be here," he muttered, though he couldn't be sure if Don had even heard him.

"I have to be here!" Don gasped, sitting up in the sand, the front of his suit dusted with sand. "I fought so hard to be here! They kept telling me no, no, no, no!" he said, shaking his head violently with each word. "But I'm here, and I'm gonna do this."

Wallace's face twisted as he watched Don struggle to even sit up straight and form coherent sentences. "Drunk, you're drunk," he said as he rolled over on the beach and spread his arms and legs. Flattening himself to the sand, Wallace felt his stomach convulse as a new kind of pain wracked his body. Not physical or even mental, rather pain brought on by the absence of feeling. A hollowing feeling opened up in his chest by the clip of Andrew's video and with its arrival every piece of joy was ripped from him, leaving him raw and exposed to every kind of pain. The wind scraped his face and the waves and cries of pokémon made his ears bleed.

"Don, leave, I can't do this right now, my mind," he said, as he touched his fingers to his temples and pressed hard, mimicking the feeling of a searing migraine. He looked up at the stars, attempting to focus on just one, but ended up tracking each of the small glints of light above him at once.

"I haven't had the courage until now, Cole helped me," Don said, his voice deepening as he burped and crawled toward Wallace.

As if watching it all in a delayed reaction, Wallace didn't realize how close Don had come until he felt lips against his mouth. Wallace stayed still for a minute, two, maybe less, maybe just seconds, but he felt Don's mouth moving across his own before he kissed back, and then their mouths opened. Wallace didn't do anything as Don's face smushed his glasses between them.

Don lifted up and smiled, lopsided and drunk and rather than stop him, Wallace removed his glasses, folding them down against his chest as Don swung a leg over and straddled him. Don's hands came to rest on the sides of Wallace's face, his fingers nesting in the short strands of his hair as his thumbs traced across Wallace's cheeks and down his lips.

Don's head tipped from side to side and Wallace read his expression as vague. He could have liked the shape of Wallace's teeth or found something interesting in the sand. Wallace's eyes fluttered as he considered stopping him, but before he could say anything he felt Don's lips molding to his again.

Don put his hand on Wallace's chest, unmoving, which Wallace felt trapped under, despite possibly being able to overpower Don, Wallace let himself settle deeper into the sand as Don's tongue grazed his lips. "It's okay," Don breathed. "Touch me."

Wallace's hands moved like a robot's, slow and mechanical, as they came together over Don's back before they touched down like sailors on a foreign island, staking claim in uncharted territory. As his hands came apart and his fingers traced the center of Don's back Wallace felt the boy on top of him moving and shifting in response to his touch that dared him to move lower.

Wallace's fingers played against the small of Don's back before he tugged at the back of his jacket and ran his fingers along the line of his pants, meeting the band of his underwear. In between sloppy kisses, Don's lips shifted to that of a pleased grin as Wallace began playing along.

HIs stomach fluttered as Don lifted away and began to pull off his jacket, but the smell of Don's mouth, berries and alcohol mixed with the own sour taste in his mouth Wallace shot up, knocking Don off his lap as he expelled the contents of his stomach onto the beach.

Wallace squeezed his eyes shut as he hung there, on all fours, emptying the contents of his stomach to the sound of waves before him and Don crying in the sand behind him. When it felt like he had nothing left to give and his throat and mouth burned and his limbs tingled like needles prickling through his veins, Wallace swayed and collapsed on the beach until the darkness took over.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty Six

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #25:** What do you think the aftermath of Andrew's video will be for Wallace?


	27. Haven

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Twenty Seven – Haven**

 _Into the rose-garden – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace opened his eyes and took in the darkness throughout his room. Shifting his head against his pillow he observed the stillness of his dorm. Despite having hazy recollections of Garret coming and going throughout the last week and elgyem prodding him, urging him to rise from his resting place, Wallace felt as if his room had never more lifeless.

Eight days had passed since homecoming and Wallace's stagnant body fouled the undershirt and underwear he'd worn to the dance. Waking on the beach the following morning, Wallace staggered back to his room and stripped off his tuxedo, leaving it in a pile on the floor.

Overlooking the hungered cry of elgyem from across the room and the hissing of Wink who sat on the window sill, his wan scales draped in moonlight, Wallace felt the hollow cavern of his stomach make another attempt at peristalsis. His body groaned, desperate for food following a week of surviving off leftover chips and bottles of water Garret left beside his bed.

Wallace's crusted eyes flicked toward his desk as his phone vibrated across the top, Garret's interference. He plugged the phone in the first night and it hadn't stopped ringing and vibrating as Wallace wasted away. Any thoughts he had concerning the messages on his phone shattered with a rapping against his door.

Without waiting for a response, the door creaked open, a blade of fluorescent light stabbing the floor, as Eleanor's round face appeared in the gap. "Wallace?" she asked.

He watched her inch the door open, but Neo ruined her effort at a soft entrance by kicking the door open the rest of the way. "You stink," he announced with the flip of the light switch.

Wallace recoiled from the sudden light burst and covered his eyes as he sank deeper under the covers, the most movement he'd made in a week. As he found comfort in the pit of his spiritual death, the sheets ripped away from him.

Neo balled them in his hands and dunked them into the corner of the room. "No more of that," he said as he turned his attention to his tablet. "The average human can begin to develop bedsores in as little as a week and some may never heal. Is that what you want?" he asked as he grabbed Wallace's arm and pulled him, pinching at the dirty shirt. "Elle, can you grab me some clothes?"

Eleanor shuffled in the doorway, looking like she'd rather jump out a window, but crossed the floor and started pulling out drawers as she searched for clothes.

"Stop," Wallace croaked, his own voice a foreign sound to him. Unable to watch as Eleanor picked through his underwear drawer, Wallace focused on a stream of dust in the moonlight flickering below the window blinds. He distracted himself by watching the specks float in and out of his vision, focusing on a single atom of dust in its descent from the rank air to the sill. He wondered whether the dust on the sill was old or new.

"I told myself I wouldn't let you be a dick anymore," Neo said as he pulled at Wallace's wrist to get him off the bed.

"Stop it," Wallace said, rooting himself in place.

"And you're making Garret uncomfortable." Neo released his arm and pulled at the shoulder of Wallace's shirt.

Wallace groaned and chopped Neo in the crook of his arm. "Go away!"

Neo sighed, swiping at his brow. "He said he thought you died in your sleep or something. You scared the hell out of him when you opened your eyes all of a sudden in the middle of the night."

"Just get out!" Wallace said, louder, as he saw Eleanor picking through his closet.

"I don't know what's got you in a mood, but it's gotta stop," Neo said as he made an attempt for Wallace's foot. "You haven't been to class in a week. Your pokémon look miserable. What kind of trainer are you?"

Latching onto Neo's tablet as the boy tried to pull Wallace's leg out from the covers, Wallace pulled Neo onto the bed, knocking the boy off balance. Taking advantage of the moment, Wallace pressed into Neo's shoulders and shoved him back onto the floor. The sound sent Wink scurrying off the window sill and elgyem floated toward the ceiling, the red lights on his hands flashing. Eleanor jumped and collapsed into the closet, a shower of hangers falling over her as her eyes flicked between the two boys.

"Can you just stop? For two seconds?" Wallace pleaded. He heard it in his own voice, the sad desperation bred from knowing he'd let himself wallow for too long, but each day that passed the idea of rejoining society seemed bleak. Content to a laggard death within four white walls, Wallace fell back onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his chest.

"Is there someone we can call?" Eleanor asked as she approached the side of the bed, her arms full of folded clothes. She eyed Wallace's leg, sticking out in her direction as she placed her armful beside him. "I got you a towel and some clothes," she wavered, fingering back a strand of hair as she looked toward the dresser. "It looks like all your soap and shampoo and stuff are there. I know it probably feels good. To stay in here, deal with whatever you're dealing with, but if you won't get out of bed for yourself, do it for your pokémon. They depend on you." Ellie crouched beside the bed and gave the underside of Wink's snout a quick scratch prior to heading for the door with Neo.

"What day is it?" Wallace asked, focusing on a ceiling tile above his bed.

"It's Sunday. October ninth," Eleanor said.

"Thanks," he said to the sound of his door shutting.

Counting the passing seconds following their fading footsteps, Wallace peeled himself from the bed. Touching his feet to the cold tile below him, the shock of a new sensation sent chills through his spine, a radical difference from the rough and sweaty sheets that scratched his skin. Though the idea that getting out of bed would solve his problems seemed ridiculous, he remembered the last time he pulled himself together by putting away everything he'd ordered from the bookstore and decided to give Eleanor's advice a try.

Pulling his phone from his desk, Wallace flicked through a slew of messages and calls from numbers he didn't recognize, and some he did: Izumi, Tempest, Carrie, Neo, Azalea, Don, and even his father had tried to reach him. He lingered on some of the call logs, tempted to call back, but at the sight of his father's number and the seven times he'd tried to call, Wallace buried the phone under his pillow.

Biting at his lip, Wallace pulled open one of his desk drawers and grabbed a large pack of pokémon food that he dropped on the floor on his way to Garret's miniature fridge and grabbed a couple bottles of water. Blowing dust and hair from the trays he used to feed his team, Wallace filled them with water and food pellets and scooted the trays into the center of the room.

He grabbed Wink and placed the totodile in front of the food as he watched elgyem waver near the ceiling. "It's okay," he said, a little sad to see elgyem's reluctance. "I'm okay." Scanning the room for spinarak, Wallace laid on the floor and peered under his bed to find the bug-type dangling from a thread attached. to the bed frame.

Removing spinarak, Wallace led him toward the food trays, the bug-type skittering across his hands in a panic at the sight of a long awaited dinner.

Spinarak and Wink made quick work of their feast and Wallace filled another tray and placed it on top of his dresser, closer to elgyem. "It's okay, you can eat now," Wallace said, his eyes watering as elgyem flashed the yellow digits on his hands as he kept his distance from Wallace and the food.

"I'll leave if you need some time," he said, gathering the clothes Eleanor had prepared for him. Mindful to keep his distance from elgyem, he gathered an armful of assorted toiletries from his dresser.

Wallace slipped into a pair of flip flops and left his room, his eyes on elgyem who hadn't moved any closer to the food. Pulling the door shut behind him, Wallace pressed his forehead to the wood and waited a moment and headed into the bathroom.

The process of cleansing himself of eight days of funk wasn't pretty. He turned the water of the shower as high as he could stand until it burned him and turned him pink as he scrubbed every inch of his body. He razored his face, light hairs sticking to his chest that discount herbal shampoo washed through the drain. He brushed his teeth until his spit was blood pink and rolled on a generous amount of deodorant and applied lotion to every stretch of skin, imagining the façade of a well-adjusted person would mold to his skin and mask the kind of person he'd become.

Rubbing in a dollop of lotion into his neck, Wallace caught his reflection in the mirror, the first sight of himself he'd had since he dressed in the bathroom outside the dance. What kept him ducking his reflection in his window, or his phone was the fact the one who stared back wasn't the boy Andrew had believed in. Andrew placed his faith in a friend that would follow any leads of his disappearance in the pursuit of truth, but that boy didn't exist anymore.

When his hands were numb from rubbing lotion into his skin, Wallace dressed in the clothes Eleanor picked for him and went back to his room and opened each of the windows and rolled the blinds.

Wink laid in the middle of the floor, under the ceiling light, the closest thing to sunlight in the room. Spinarak crawled along the food tray and elgyem sat on the edge of the dresser, stuffing his face with pellets. Their eyes met for a breath and elgyem flashed him a green light that put a smile on Wallace's face, though but he didn't chance approaching the psychic-type. Instead he striped his bed clean and dumped everything into a pile, along with the clothes he'd worn to the dance and kicked it all toward the open door.

"Anyone, want to come do laundry with me?" he asked as he gathered the dirtied sheets and Izumi's tuxedo. Wink darted off from his spot and smashed into Wallace's leg, falling backwards onto the floor. "It'll take that as a yes." Wallace said as he lifted the fallen totodile and pulled the door shut.

Holding Wink like a football, Wallace traveled through the ICO to the basement until the sound of washing machines whirling grew louder. He dumped his sheets into a machine, spooned a lump of powder into the machine and smashed the start button. Wandering from the vacant room he found a sad bulletin board in the hall with few fliers tacked to it. Most of were out dated, advertising the homecoming dance and the safari islands reopening, but the one he saw Eleanor hanging for the gardening club last week caught his eye.

Snatching the paper from the board, Wallace climbed back through the building and left. His flip-flops smacked the pavement as he trekked the quiet campus and headed toward Neroli Hall, the sign-up place listed on the flier.

Wink made soft snorting noises, trying to nibble on Wallace's thumb every few steps as they walked along the path between the Origin Center and the upperclass dorm. Rounding one of the classroom buildings Wallace came upon a boy standing under a connecting bridge between buildings. Wallace slowed as he approached the boy, wishing he'd put on actual shoes as it became impossible to stop his flip-flops from slapping his heels and signaling his presence.

A few yards away, the boy turned, a device in his hands lighting his face from underneath. "Yo, Wallace!" Calvin said, the under-the-chin-flashlight look giving him a horror movie appearance as he smiled. "It looks like you're the only one coming."

"What?" he asked.

"To the safari," Calvin said as he pocketed his phone. "I told you the safari islands were reopening, that's why you're here right?"

"No – uh, I was heading too –"

"C'mon, docks are this way."

Faster than Wallace could figure a way out, Calvin's arm looped his neck and he was half-guiding, half-pulling him away from Neroli and toward the Origin Center. The boys headed north from the Center and walked into the glow of lamps that illuminated the northern dock and several A-shaped lean-tos. Calvin stopped at the closest one and greeted a gruff older man rooted to a stool with a magazine in his hand. Wallace shivered close to the water as a breeze whipped through the boathouse, wishing he'd worn pants and brought a jacket.

"Just us tonight," Calvin said, passing the man whose badge read George. Calvin untied the towrope from a steel pole on the dock and tossed it into the small motor boat, the same kind that had taken Wallace to the safari the first time.

Wallace bounced from side to side, moving further back every time he landed on his right foot. He kept his eyes trained on Calvin's back as the boy worked on getting the boat ready, hoping he'd stay busy long enough for Wallace to slink into the dark of night and vanish. Securing Wink under his arm, Wallace prepared to take off as Calvin hopped into the boat and faced him. "Let's go!"

"C-Coming," Wallace's voice wavered as he stumbled toward the boat and boarded, afraid Calvin might chase him if he fled.

He took the seat at the front of the boat and watched Calvin give the dock a good kick that sent the boat crawling away from the lean-to. As the butt of the boat cleared the dock, Calvin revved the throttle and the boat shot across the water, slamming into a wave that sent them airborne. Wallace clenched the sides of the boat as Wink sat clueless in his lap, the boat slapping each wave they came to.

"Where are we going?" Wishing he'd brought his phone, Wallace stared across the black water of the archipelago Calvin had guided them across for what felt like half an hour. "Which island?"

Calvin shrugged and pulled on the tiller, causing the boat to make a sharp turn and come to a slow stop. "Your choice."

Wallace pursed his lips and turned his eyes on the waters and the moonlit backdrop of the sky. He stroked Wink's back as he pretended to study the waters, though every direction looked the same and he wasn't sure how Calvin planned on getting them to an island without getting them lost first. "I don't know, they're all the same right?"

"Almost," Calvin said with impressive vagueness. "Guess it's my choice then." Calvin started the engine again and kept straight. "Do you know about the history of the little islands out here? Before the school was built."

"Aren't they just random islands?" Wallace asked as he leaned over the edge of the boat and dared to let his finger slice the water. "I think I heard that a powerful pokémon used to live in a cave out here."

"It's more interesting than that," Calvin said. "I'll tell you when we get there."

"Where is there?" Wallace asked as he turned his head toward the front of the boat and saw trees breaking beyond the horizon.

"You know, _that_ island."

Wallace's hand tightened on the boat's edge as he shot up and whipped back to Calvin. "No! Take us back, I'm not going!" Wink scurried off Wallace's seat and hid under one of the seats in the middle as Wallace made a move for the tiller, but Calvin stretched an arm out and held him back.

"No rough housing in the boat. We could fall out and at this time of the year, this time of night, the water is freezing." Calvin said as he held Wallace back with one arm, making it look easy. "Sit down. I told you, the islands are safe now."

"Yeah? Did they catch them?" Wallace asked, Calvin's cool smirk annoying him as he guided the boat closer to the island.

"Them?" Calvin asked. "Isn't it just one dude?"

Wallace dropped back into his seat and grabbed Wink who had begun chewing on the towrope. Despite the school's claims of heightened security and safety the island looked the same as the last trip. "Where are the patrol boats and lights to make being here at night not terrifying?" Sighing, he watched the island draw nearer as Calvin guided the boat onto the beach. Wallace listened to the sand ground against the metallic hull, the roar of the engine dying.

"You do know this is a safari, not a park, right?" Calvin asked as he jumped from the boat and landed with a splash in the water that stopped at his calves "The goal is to make the wild pokémon feel like they're in a natural environment, not have them be disturbed by constant boats circling and lights that confuse them about what time of day it is if it's always bright. Besides George is enough security." Calvin shrugged off Wallace's concern as he pulled the towrope from the boat.

"George?" Wallace asked as Calvin completed the herculean task of pulling the boat further onto shore with Wallace in it. "That old fart? How is he supposed to protect people when he's on campus?"

"Relax," Calvin said as carried it upshore to the closest tree and tied it. "C'mon, a history lesson awaits." Calvin gestured to the dark mass of trees like a game show host.

"Why would I go in there?" Wallace asked as he crossed his arms, a gestured that affirmed his stand on the matter and also helped fight off the chill.

Calvin spun and looked at the island. "Well, if you stay in the boat what if someone comes along and you're out here by yourself? At least if you follow me you aren't alone."

Wallace deadpanned and hoisted his totodile into the air. "I've got Wink."

"And I've got a team of six on my hip. So, what's it gonna be?" Calvin pulled a ball from under his shirt and chucked it into the air. The brief bit of light that it released blinded Wallace. A dark figure swooped through the air above Calvin and came to rest beside him.

"Can't we just go back?" Wallace asked, resorting to whining to get Calvin back in the boat.

"No way, I won't feel like I've done my job if we leave without a proper tour," Calvin said as he began rubbing the head of whatever pokémon he'd called out.

"So now it's your job?" Wallace asked as he swung a leg out of the boat and took his first step back onto the island in two months.

"I'm a tour guide for the university, the just walking around campus is boring so I decided to do my work out here," Calvin said.

"Why not give tours where crazy killers live?" Wallace asked as he trudged up the beach with Wink held in front of him as a first line of defense.

"Why do you carry your totodile like that?" Calvin asked. "Something wrong with him?"

"He's not fully developed, yet, he needs a little help." Walking closer to Calvin, Wallace got a better look at his accompanying pokémon, a togekiss with a wingspan that looked capable of enveloping both of them. As Wallace approached it the togekiss shuffled back on the sand and tried to hide behind its trainer, beside being too big to hide.

"She's shy." Calvin shrugged. "But let's get going." Calvin pulled something from his pocket and spun it in the air and caught it. Calvin clicked something in his hand and another light blinded Wallace. "Didn't think we'd be traveling in the dark, did you?"

"I didn't think you were _that_ stupid," Wallace said, shielding his eyes from the flashlight.

"There's a fine line between stupid and brave," Calvin said as he headed toward the trees, his togekiss trotting at his side.

* * *

Even with Calvin's flashlight and helpful advice, the trip through the safari was torture. The path was uneven and filled with protruding tree roots that Wallace's flip-flops got stuck in and dislodged him from his shoes and low dips in the ground that Calvin managed to avoid, but forget to warn Wallace to watch out for. Small pokémon darted into their path, attracted to the circle of light Calvin cast across the ground, but darted back under the cover of bushes.

"You wanna catch something while we're here?" Calvin asked.

"Besides a cold?" Wallace said, coughing for effect. "I didn't bring anything. So, this history lesson?"

"Oh yeah," Calvin sang, turning the flashlight on his own face from under his chin again. "It's a good story. It takes place during the war," he said as he turned the light back on their path and turned it toward hanging canopy of tree vines and leaves.

Prior to Calvin reaching the curtain of vines, something burst through from the other side. Something dark shot out from in front of Calvin, causing him to flinch and drop the flashlight, the torch casting a glint of light on a series of blue tendrils. As Wallace tried to comprehend what happened, the tendrils tangled togekiss, securing Calvin's pokemon in a type of lasso that pulled it toward the canopy.

Wallace watched togekiss struggle against the mass of tendrils restrained its body that constricted its wings from opening. "Toge!" it cried, collapsing onto the ground as the tendrils coiled back, dragging togekiss toward the canopy.

"Let her go!" Calvin shouted as he leaped over togekiss and landed onto the appendage.

Wallace dropped to the ground, releasing Wink, as he fumbled for the flashlight and aimed it at Calvin in time to see the boy holding the long blue appendage with both hands. He watched the muscles in the boy's arms bulge as he made a slight tear in the tendril. Taking advantage of the small tear, Calvin pulled again on the tendrils until he ripped them in half.

The damaged half flapped in the air as it vanished back into the canopy, though Calvin paid it no mind as he worked to free togekiss. With a trembling arm, Wallace kept turning the light on Calvin and the canopy as the vines shifted and swayed.

"Togekiss, use fairy wind, girl."

Calvin ran behind togekiss as she wobbled to her feet and spread her wings, breaking free from the last of the blue tendrils. She let out an airy screech as she flapped her wings, flecks of pink dust flitting through the air as her wings moved. A gust of wind parted the canopy and revealed a tall blue figure on the other side.

Wallace gripped the flashlight with both hands to keep it steady as he illuminated a body bound in blue vines so thick it looked like one giant tangle. As he stared at the creature he noticed a pair of round beady eyes staring back at him through the vines, a sight that made him jerk back and drop the flashlight.

The sudden change in lighting must have startled it because as Wallace ducked to grab the light again he heard a whooshing sound and Calvin yelling. Turning the flashlight, Wallace saw Calvin several feet off the ground, blue vines looping his waist as he tried to pry them off.

"This is not okay!" Calvin roared as his legs tangled in the vines and he tried biting at one that came near his face.

"Toge!" Togekiss flapped her wings as she cried out, her ovoid eyes scrunched in distress.

"Use air slash on this thing!" Calvin said.

Wallace grabbed Wink and backed away, his flashlight shifting from Calvin, to togekiss, to the tentacle monster. Blue lights outlined togekiss' wings in the dark as she gave one mighty flap and shot arrow-like projectiles through the air that sliced the vines holding Calvin aloft.

Wallace turned back onto the pokémon as he heard Calvin hit the ground, both its arms waved in the air, their ends jagged and torn. "Is it done?" he asked.

The pokémon leaned back, its arms moving faster, as it let out of a mellow warbling sound. What followed was the sound of chanting and feet shuffling through dirt as the bushes rustled. Small tangles of blue vines with red feet hopped from the bushes, wriggling masses moving without rhythm or pattern that gathered before their larger companion.

Wallace listened to Calvin let out a slew of curses as he shuffled in the dirt and he slammed into his side, snatching the flashlight back. "Tangela. Tangrowth. Did we find a nesting area?"

"Are they dangerous?" Wallace asked.

"I mean, togekiss can take them, but –"

Calvin fell silent as the horde of tangela started crying in concert, their vines whipping and cracking in the air as they turned to the large tangrowth and fired green lights from their bodies. Tangrowth stood tall against their attacks, its own body glowing as the ends of its arms began to flourish and regrow, new blue vines taking the place of the ones it lost with red tips.

Tangrowth held its arm out, the red tips of its finger trembling before its vines shot out. The boys dove for the ground and togekiss took flight with one flap of her wings. Wallace reached out and pulled Wink closer to his body, the small totodile breathing hard with excitement.

Wallace watched the light from torch dart across the forest as Calvin rolled to his feet, his arm outstretched. "Flamethrower!"

Wallace watched the tangrowth and its posse pay him no mind as togekiss came toward the path, a red ball of fire concentrated in front of its mouth. The avian pokémon slowed as she neared the grass-types and unleashed a jet stream of fire that lit the forest in reds and oranges and filled the path with heat as her flames licked the heads of the tangela.

As Wallace got to his feet, togekiss had taken to the sky again, avoiding the cracking whips of tangrowth's arms. Small balls of fire danced across the path, tangela on fire. One fell beside Wallace, its vines burned black and standing on end as its eyes fluttered shut.

Moving back through the canopy, tangrowth avoided the blaze as it burned the path ahead of Wallace and ate at the ends of the canopy vines.

"Shit, shit, shit. The fire," Calvin said as he ranked his hands through his hair. Gasping, he whirled toward Wallace. "Your totodile, have it use water gun."

"I don't know if Wink knows that," Wallace muttered, getting quieter with each word. "I haven't battled with him yet, he's just a baby."

"Try something!" Calvin said as he started kicking dirt to extinguish a small fire near his foot.

Wallace crouched with Wink and placed him in the path of the fire. "If you know any water moves, can you just fire straight ahead?"

"Toto?" Wink squeaked, his head twitching from side to side.

"Wink, It doesn't have to be strong, or good, just something, something to help us not burn down the safari," Wallace said. "Please, anything."

Calvin aimed the light on Wink whose good eye popped open in reaction to the light. Wallace watched the red eye dart in its socket, the pupil changing in size as Wink's cheeks bulged. A gurgling sound filled his mouth before he spat a gush of water onto the ground, but rather than fire it, the water coated Wink as he stepped through it, forming to his body like a coating before he shot across the path.

In a second, Wink had crossed the path, his water coated body dousing the fires that the frantic tangela had spread. Calvin ran behind the totodile, stomping out smaller fires and Wallace ran straight for Wink and held him up. "That was amazing," he gasped. "Wink, you did so good!"

"Toto!" Wink let out a high gargling sound as he wiggled in Wallace's hands.

"I thought you said he was a baby, where'd he learn aqua jet?" Calvin asked, scanning the trees with the flashlight.

"I don't know," Wallace said. "I didn't teach him that, I've only had him for a few weeks. I hatched him from an egg one of the deans gave me."

"So it's an egg move?" Calvin asked as he turned to Wink and scratched the top of his head. "Well, Wink, just saved our skins and the safari from being burned up."

Wink tipped his head back and snapped at Calvin's fingers, letting out a pleased squeak. "Toto!"

"Why did tangrowth attack us?" Wallace asked, stepping away from the canopy the grass-type had gone through, worried it might grab him.

"Don't know." Calvin whistled as he parted the canopy and stepped through.

Wallace followed Calvin as he put the flashlight in his mouth and began parting some of the vines and branches, clearing an opening for them.

"Maybe it knows the story of this place and is protecting it," Calvin said.

"The story of this place?" Wallace asked.

"The story I was trying to tell you. I said it takes place during the war when Pokémon were the best weapons used by soldiers. it didn't matter if they were injured or suffering from poison or burns, they were used to fight alongside their wounded or dying trainers."

As they stepped through the canopy Wallace narrowed his eyes for any dark figures in the field they'd stepped into. Though he found no sign of tangrowth, Wallace kept his eyes sweeping the field of high grass for it.

"It got so bad soldiers started going awol, looking for places to hide and they found this island," Calvin said, turning the flashlight on the field around them. "What would become our safari once was a safe place for soldiers of war to run and seek shelter. Here they found an underground hideaway and rooms connected to it where they would receive food and medical care. To keep from being discovered, when they were able to travel they were guided to other tunnels that branched off from the main one. Those tunnels led to the other islands in the bay."

"Underwater tunnels?" Wallace asked as he watched his feet stomping through high grass. "How did they manage to hold their breath that long. There were no other islands in sight from the shore."

"The tunnels are underwater, but they're not water tunnels, if that makes sense," Calvin said. "You dig trenches and then tunnels by using rock and metal and stuff like that and then you can pump out the water so you have tunnels that are dry. But something like that doesn't get done without gaining massive attention, so the tunnels were no secret, not even from the people that chased awol soldiers."

"So not everyone made it to freedom?" Wallace asked as he followed the sound of Calvin's footsteps across the endless field with no trees. He kept scratching Wink's head, wondering if the totodile ever wondered what Wallace had gotten him into.

"Not quite. The people chasing soldiers would wind up in the tunnels too, hoping to find who they were looking for, but they'd get lost," Calvin said. "Anyone led into the tunnels with the goal of looking for shelter and safety was told to follow web lines that hung from the tunnel ceiling, left there by the tunnel creator and her pokémon as guidelines. If you went in looking for soldiers to capture you weren't told about the webs and you died inside after getting lost."

"So if you found the underground passage, you could travel to any other island?" Wallace asked, his steps slowing while Calvin continued on. His mind whirled back to months prior to a hatch in the floor they'd discovered inside the abandoned mansion.

"Pretty much," Calvin said, his voice faint. "But after the war ended the hunt for soldiers lessened and Kalos changed, for the better I think. The escape routes weren't needed any more so people built a home over the main tunnel to act as a place for trainers to rest as they entered Kalos if they had made the trip by sea. No one stayed for long, but it was stocked monthly by the same woman who created the tunnels in the first place. The legend is that her only request of traveling trainers was that they sign a log book inside the house stating their name and what their journey had been like prior to finding the Haven."

"Haven?"

"That's what the house was called," Calvin said as he turned and cast the light on Wallace. "You coming? Don't wuss out on me now that we're at the best part."

"Best part?" Wallace asked, stomping through the grass until he was at by Calvin's side.

Calvin grinned as he swept the light across the ground toward the side of a building. The double front doors, locked shut by metal chains sent a bolt of pain through Wallace's back and a ring of fire haloed his skull. "Calvin, this, this is the mansion."

"I know," Calvin said. "This is where that guy attacked you, but this is also the Haven. Funny how the world works."

"There's nothing funny about this!" Wallace snapped, snatching the flashlight from Calvin. "Why did you bring me to the mansion?"

"It's part of the history!" Calvin said, sounding like he believed that justified it.

"He could be inside!" Wallace hissed. "God, you're unbelievable. I'm going back." Wallace held Wink closer and aimed the light in front of him as he followed the dents in the grass he'd made back toward the edge of the clearing.

"So you're going to leave me out here, no light, no nothing?" Calvin asked. "If he is inside, I'm dead meat."

"Guess you better follow me then," Wallace quipped.

"Don't you want to know the rest of the story?" Calvin asked. "About the woman who made the tunnels?"

Wallace stopped and turned the light on Calvin who flinched from it and held a hand over his face. "Talk and walk at the same time."

Calvin shrugged, but rather than walk toward him, he started backing up toward the mansion. "No problem."

Wallace paled watching Calvin move closer to the mansion's front doors, the sight of the metal chains causing him to tremble. Had the police locked the mansion up after searching for Chara?

"No one knows her name and I couldn't find anything while I was doing my research for the job," Calvin shouted from the front of the house as he tried the doors, the jiggling of chains louder than anything. "But they called her Saint Silkweave. According to some old history books she's the matriarch of a family of trainers that now go by the Seamhearts. She was scared for young trainers and their pokémon during the war so she came up with a plan to make the tunnels. She let her bug-type pokémon travel the tunnels and lay lines for safe guidance. She did it often, to keep the lines visible, but it's been forever she since passed and I can't imagine anything of the lines remain at this point."

"So no one could use the tunnels?" Wallace asked, shouting back across the clearing. His eyes flicked toward the building as he aimed the light on each of the windows across the front of the building. While passing the light over an open window Wallace saw a something move in the afterglow of the light. "I saw something!"

"Bullshit!" Calvin shouted, though he came charging across the field to Wallace's side.

Wallace jutted his arm out and focused on the window. "There, I swear, I saw something in the window."

"A curtain?" Calvin asked.

The boys fell silent as they watched and waited until two large circles moved into the window, followed a dark flame. Wallace's breath hitched in his throat as another figure moved into the window, a boy's face lit up by the flashlight, one he recognized. "Carl?" he asked, squinting, but sure enough he recognized the tanned skin and beach blond hair of his safari partner.

"What are you doing out here?" Calvin asked, cupping his hands to his mouth, as if he wasn't loud enough already.

Carl leaned out the window and shielded his eyes from the light. "Just looking around."

"All the way out here?" Calvin asked.

"My walk around campus led me to the dock and one of the night watch guys brought me here," Carl looked down the side of the building and shrugged. "I kind of found this place on accident."

"How'd you get inside?" Calvin asked. "The doors are locked."

"My scizor flew me in." Carl used his thumb to point around the building. "There's a hole in the side of the building. It's taped up with police tape, but I got in easily. You guys coming in?"

"No," Wallace groaned.

"Yes!" Calvin cheered as he grabbed Wallace's shoulder and pulled him the way Carl directed.

Once Calvin had togekiss positioned in front of the hole where Don's roserade had blown three windows out, Wallace found himself perched on togekiss' back with Calvin as the dual-type pokémon floated to the second floor and deposited the boys inside.

"Thanks, girl," Calvin gave togekiss a smooch on the head before he recalled her and he pounded Carl in the chest. "Thanks for the tip."

Carl faltered, grinning, but Wallace could see the punch to the chest had taken him by surprise. "Hi, Carl," Wallace said as he watched two yellow eyes and a flickering purple flame trailed behind Carl, a lampent, he recognized.

"Hey," he said, wincing.

"I guess I can really finish my history lesson now that we're inside the house where it all started," Calvin said, running his hand across the peeling striped wallpaper.

Watching Calvin interact with the mansion made Wallace's head throb. Loosing his balance, Wallace slammed against the wall and pinched at the bridge of his nose, the memories of that night searing to the forefront of his mind. The urgency in getting Neo's lampent to the clinic, watching Chara lead Simone, Ben, and Dirk toward the mansion and the odd feeling he got from Garret's fear of the mansion. Though the mansion had appeared vacant the sound of a tuned and cleaned piano told him someone lived inside. He could remember following Chara and getting caught by him, pretending to be a girl. Images of Chara's innocuous face pulsed through his mind and bloomed black spots in his eyes.

"You okay?"

Wallace snapped out of his blackout as a hand fell on his shoulder and he saw Carl at his side. "Fine," he breathed.

"You don't look fine," Calvin said.

"You wouldn't either if you were back here after what I went through," Wallace said. "It's not like Chara is in custody, he's loose."

"You know, my best guess as to why the school can't find him is that he knows the tunnel system here. While they swarmed this island he escaped to a different one. It's what makes the most sense." Calvin said. "And even if the school holds regular search parties or searched all the islands at once he could just hide in the tunnels. Not like they'd be easy to find if you didn't know what you were looking for."

"Wonderful," Wallace said. "So he's smarter than the police. Can we go now?"

"You really have no sense of adventure," Calvin said, grinning as he clicked on the flashlight and turned a corner. "Follow me, please."

* * *

"Did he really kill someone in here?" Carl asked, the only sound passed between the boys since they started following Calvin who led them through the mansion several times, checking different rooms, and taking different routes each time.

Wallace sucked a breath through his nose, guessing Carl knew the answer to the question since he decided to ask it as they passed the grand staircase. As if his anxiety regarding a flight of stairs wasn't tragic enough, Wallace had to climb to the first floor and pass the spot where Dirk had died, a dark splotch marked onto the step.

"Just a little further boys," Calvin said from ahead of them. "I'll find the tunnel, I'm sure of it."

Despite the memories of that day flashing back in full, Wallace couldn't exactly remember the path he'd followed to the room with the trapdoor, or else would have put Calvin out of his misery and led them to the tunnel already. Instead, he followed along, between Carl and Calvin, holding onto Wink for dear life and twitching at every noise inside the mansion.

As the boys made their loop around the first floor, Calvin tried every door they came too and ventured inside for a quick inspection. Reaching the last door in the hall he pushed his way inside, but paused and whispered for Wallace and Carl to join him.

Reluctantly, Wallace inched behind Calvin and peered over his shoulder to see a candle lit on a table inside a large room. Bumps rose across his skin as he made out the shapes in the room, a small kitchenette, a bed, and a table, a miniature house set within one room. A long couch sat in the middle of the room, but beyond it, he knew the trapdoor had to be there.

"You've got to be some kind of stupid to come back here."

Wallace tensed watching a shadow move in the light of the camera. A pair of legs swung down from the end of the couch and touched down, a body standing up in the room, their features cloaked in darkness. Wallace heard Calvin's breathing quicken and heard Carl swallow behind him as the figure moved around the couch and grabbed the candle, pulling it toward their face.

Wallace's felt the heat bleed from his face as the marred and discolored features of James appeared by candlelight. Half of James' face had become swollen and pussy as a result of the direct poison sting he'd taken during their last meeting.

"Chara went looking for you about a week ago, but during all the dance chaos he couldn't find you," James said. "We were going to regroup and plan our next attack, but you've done us such a curtesy of delivering yourself."

"This isn't real," Carl muttered.

"Who is this fool?" Calvin asked as he took a brave step into the room, angling the light on James' face. "What do you think you're doing here? This is private property belonging to the university."

James ice blue eyes grew wide as Calvin approached him before he lunged. His hand shot forth and jabbed under Calvin's throat as James pushed him toward a wall and held him in place, his hand gripping around his neck. "It must have been your mouth I heard while I was trying to sleep," James hissed.

"Let him go!" Wallace stormed into the room, but kept his distance.

"Are you going to trade yourself for him?" James asked, craning his neck around, the scarred side of his face aimed at Wallace. "I can call Chara back, he's been waiting for – "

Calvin's fist cut through the air, catching the light, as it chopped into James' throat. Wallace watched the Orphan drop to the ground and clutch his throat, sputtering as Calvin pulled his foot back and kicked him in his stomach.

"Who is this freak?" Calvin asked, rubbing his own throat.

"He's with Chara," Wallace said, in awe at Calvin's strength. "We should go, tell the boat operator that brought Carl here."

"R-Right," Carl said.

"Nibbler!" James coughed as he threw his arm up.

"Nibbler?" Calvin asked, looking back to James as they headed back through the door.

Wallace shoved Carl and Calvin into the hall as the room exploded with a burst of light. A pair of clawed feet touched down and echoing roar filled the room, the massive body it belonged to half hidden in the darkness. Another roar from James' garchomp sent the three boys sprinting down the hall as the dragon-types's claws clicked against the floor as it chased them.

Carl led the way out of the hall and into the entry before he broke off to the side and ran up the stairs, Calvin hot on his heels. Wallace kept running straight and headed for the doors. Hands posed to turn the knobs, Wallace grunted in surprise as he slammed into the doors and felt them open an inch before they refused to budge.

"C'mon!" he cried as he threw his weight against the door, only to see the glint of metal chains outside keeping the door shut. As he backed away something whooshed past his head before the garchomp sunk its claws into the wood beside him.

Wallace's legs gave away for a moment, his knees buckling beneath him as he backed up and held a squirming Wink to his chest.

"Toto!" Wink squeaked as Wallace heard the same water gurgling sound from before.

Loosening his grip on the totodile, Wallace felt a gush of water wet his hands before Wink shot from his arms and head butted the garchomp, the torrent of water around his body shattering upon impact. Garchomp roared and spun, its tail swinging through the air and smacking Wink away.

Wallace turned and sprinted across the entry as his totodile soared through the air, smacking the opposite fall and hitting the ground with a soft grunt. "Wink!" he cried as he scooped the water-type up in his arms. Holding Wink close Wallace could see his small heart thundering in his chest.

Taking one of the exits from the entry, Wallace found himself in the kitchen, sliding across the tiled floor as he hid between the island counter. He pulled Wink in between his legs and tipped his head down, pressing his lips to the totodile's snout as he heard garchomp's claws clicking against the kitchen tile.

"Dazzling gleam!"

Wallace perked his head up in time to see white and pink lights flashing from the other room before an explosion knocked garchomp off its feet and sent it flying across the kitchen and into a row of counters before it slid to the floor in a heap.

"Wallace!"

Wallace rushed to his feet and ran around the island, eyeing the fallen, but stirring, garchomp as he ran back into the entry and found Calvin and togekiss at the base of the steps. He didn't waste time with a thank you as he climbed the steps and joined Carl at the top.

"Head for the way we came in," Calvin commanded. "Togekiss, get ready to fly us down."

Wallace ducked as togekiss soared overhead, following the hall before it turned. Looking back, Wallace didn't see James chasing them as they turned the corner and found the hole in the wall. Calvin pressed ahead first and jumped from the building. Wallace slid to the stop outside the hole and watched as Calvin seemed to avoid landing on togekiss, who hovered just below the gap, and landed on the grass in a tucked roll.

"Jump!" Calvin barked. "What are you waiting for?"

Wallace moved back, looking to Carl, who rather than jump had called out his scizor who had lifted Carl up and flew him out of the hole. Inching toward the hole, Wallace dropped to his butt and slid out, landing awkwardly on togekiss' back who faltered in the air before she lowered him.

Without a need for instruction the boys ran in a line toward the trees, following the tamped down grass to find their way back.

"Where's your boat?" Calvin asked as his feet pounded the earth as he led their charge back through the forest.

"Other side!" Carl wheezed.

"No way," Calvin said. "Follow us, we'll take one boat back."

Wallace kept tossing looks over his shoulder as they ran further from the mansion, expecting James to emerge out of nowhere and block them, or worse. But their stampede back to the beach came without incident and Wallace was elated to see the boat still where Calvin left it. He and Carl crawled inside as Calvin untied them and chucked a Poké Ball onto the sand. "Crawdaunt!"

As he tossed the towrope into the bow Calvin barked a command a large dark crustacean pokémon that gripped the boat with its claws and pushed off from the beach. The boat slid back down into the water and the pokémon dragged itself into the shallows and pushed them further out until the motor cleared the sand and Calvin recalled it. With eyes on the beach, Calvin started the boat and sped away from the island, leaving foamy water in their wake.

* * *

As the boys reached the dock Wallace couldn't hop out of the boat fast enough. George, the security guard, snored from his stool as Calvin retied the boat and Carl climbed onto the dock.

"That was fun, right?" Calvin asked as he hung his hands off his hips. "We should do it again."

"Totally," Wallace said, his lips dripping with sarcasm.

"Who's going to tell the police?" Carl asked.

"I'll do it, I'll head there now, you two should head back to your rooms," Calvin said as he started walking away from the dock. "Get back safe. See ya."

"I can't believe you were in there with him," Wallace said as he turned to Carl who had called out scizor who had started to carry Carl into the air.

"I know, I don't think I'm ever going back out there," Carl said with a wave as he lifted into the sky.

Wallace stepped back as scizor took flight and began to look like a dark blot against the galaxy of stars. Wallace waited until Carl disappeared before he started walking from the dock, taking the same path back toward Neroli until he was under the bridge again. Pausing, Wallace stared at the main feature of Neroli Hall, a large greenhouse attached to the building bathed in the moonlight that reflected off the glass.

Holding onto Wink tightly, Wallace wandered toward the greenhouse. Near the edge of the structure, Wallace found several panes of glass that seemed cleaner than the rest with etchings carved into them. Across the glass were phrases written in all caps that looked like they must have taken considerable time to carve into the glass. Names were carved into the glass as well, some he recognized. "Serena Saint-Mars, Nasturtium Freelily," he read aloud, his fingers tracing the carvings of their names along with others he didn't recognize.

A shift in the greenery behind the glass startled Wallace. Backing up he saw a figure moving inside, moving away from the glass as if whoever was inside mimicked him. Rounding the greenhouse, Wallace found a glass door separate from the main door of the building that led into the greenhouse. "Hello?" he asked, sticking his head inside. "Is someone in here? I saw a flier for the gardening club," he added, not that it mattered, he had no interest in gardening.

A mop of dark hair rose up behind a large fern before the head of a bulbasaur came into view, followed by Neo's roommate, Kit, who waved at Wallace.

"Oh, it's you," Wallace said, resting a hand on his chest, realizing there were several people he would have hated to fun into, Chara taking first prize on that list. "What are you doing here?" he asked as he stepped into the greenhouse and let the door shut behind him. The autumn chill all but vanished into the warm greenhouse.

Kit pulled his notepad out and removed a pen from behind his ear and scratched his reply down. _Tending to the flowers. Are you here to sign-up?_

"Rose gardening?" Wallace asked as he followed a path of circular stones in the ground. "No, I saw the flier, I was coming here earlier, but got – pulled away," he said. "Really, I just needed to get out of my room."

Kit's face lightened with a smile as he started writing. _I feel the same, sometimes. Neo is nice, but it's nice to find a place I feel at home._

"And this is it?" Wallace asked as he left Kit and followed the path in a circle that branched off into a side path that led to an old looking stone bench made for two.

Kit trailed behind him, his bulbasaur making odd sounds as he trotted between his trainer's legs. _I spend most of my time here, watering the plants, and helping out._

"Helping?" Wallace asked as Kit flipped the page of his notebook and tapped a circled response on the other page, _The Roses_. "You're part of the Roses? You don't seem like the type to be in a secret society."

Kit shook his head, his brow furrowing as he flipped to a new page and scrawled down his reply. _It's more than that. The Roses help people who can't find help anywhere else. The school, it tries, but there are things the staff don't understand. You should know that._

Wallace felt Kit's words strike deep, despite them being silent. "So if it's more than just some secret society, what exactly are the Roses?"

The sound of the glass greenhouse door slamming back against stone caused Wallace and Kit to jolt in their spots and run from the stone bench back to the main path. Serena and Willow stood in the doorway, the former shutting the door behind them as they entered. Wallace watched Serena's footfalls as her heels landed squarely in the middle of each stone tile as she approached them.

"I can answer that for you," she said with a wink as she passed Wallace and paused beside Kit. "Did you finish watering everything?"

Kit bobbed his head and Wallace watched his hands tremble as he tried to flip a page and write to Serena who swatted the notebook from his hand. Kit let out an inhuman shriek as he fell to the ground and covered his head.

"Relax, I barely touched you," Serena sighed as her eyes fell back on Wallace. "Follow me, class is in session."

Despite having had enough of following people in the dead of night, Wallace nodded and moved around Kit who struggled to find his pen in the near darkness that gathered on the greenhouse floor. Wink snorted in his arms as Wallace brushed himself against a bouquet of flowers.

"Don't think you're done for the night," Willow said. "You still have the flowers in Neroli to water."

Wallace paused as Serena stopped walking and tossed a look over her shoulder to Willow. The white haired girl stood over Kit who scribbled in his pad before he held it up for her. Willow snatched it out of his hand and made a scene of squinting at the pad to read. "You already watered all the plants in the building too, you're done for the night?" Willow read, her eyes narrowing even further onto Kit as she tossed the pad back at him. "Well don't think you're getting an easier assignment tomorrow, same deal, the entire greenhouse and every potted plant needs watering."

"Will you shut up?" Serena asked.

Wallace saw Willow's sneer shatter at Serena's words. The white haired girl pointed to Kit and started to move her mouth, though no words came out.

"He did a good job in here," Serena said. "He _always_ does a good job, stop trying to boss him around. All he asks if that we let him work alone, he likes to tend to the plants in peace. God, you're so annoying, just let people enjoy things for once without critiquing everything." Serena flipped a lock of her ink black hair as she followed the stone path deeper into the greenhouse. "Kit, you're free to go, thanks for your work today."

Wallace stayed frozen in place as Kit nodded to Serena's back and ducked around Willow, letting out a low sound that called his bulbasaur to his side before they both vanished out of the greenhouse.

"Go," Willow barked at Wallace.

He nodded before he followed the path Serena had taken, fighting back the urge to say anything to Willow regarding Andrew's video considering how upset she was the video played before she could do it herself. Deep in the greenhouse, where the circular stones turned into oblong slabs, Wallace found Serena sitting at the end of a small courtyard that looked too big to fit inside the greenhouse based on its size from the outside. But there she was, perched in a stone chair against the far glass wall, her leg crossed and arms laid on the rests of the chair.

"Is that a throne?" he asked, narrowing his eyes at the way Serena seemed at ease in the seat.

"Something like that," she said, snapping her fingers.

Willow darted around Wallace and moved to stand on a wide stone slab to the right of Serena. Behind Serena's throne Wallace rocks shifting and the faint sound of pokémon cries.

"Wallace, I'm missing my other lackey. Can you stand there please?" Serena asked as she pointed a manicured nail at another slab of stone to her left.

Wallace walked uneasily toward the spot and the moment he stepped down the slab sunk a little in the ground and he heard stones sliding against each other behind Serena before the patter of feet filled the courtyard. Scanning the thick arrangement of plants around them, Wallace watched a fleet of green pokémon flood the courtyard. They were no taller than Wallace's shins with two long vines that clamped together over their heads as they darted across the room.

One ran straight for Wallace, its yellow face wide with a smile as it circled him. "Bud, bud, dew!"

"Budew?" Wallace asked. "Do they belong to you?" he asked as he watched a conga line of budew form and begin to dance and circle Serena's seat.

"No," Serena said the budew moved in rhythm around her leg. "They were given to me to look after by the previous leader of the Roses. It's kind of tradition," Serena snapped in Willow's direction again.

Wallace watched Willow roll her eyes and step off her slab and vanish into the greenery, only to return with a circlet of roses and place it on Serena's head. "You're so extra," Willow said as she adjusted some strands of Serena's hair around her rose crown.

Serena patted her cheek and blew a kiss at Willow. "Perks of being the rose queen."

"So this place is like your office?" Wallace asked as he became entranced watching the dance of the budew around Serena.

"Yes, also passed onto me by the last leader," Serena said as she leaned back in the chair that looked uncomfortable, though Serena made the stone look like it was cashmere. "I'm sure you've heard a little about us."

"Don said Nat can't battle on campus of the Roses and people seem scared of them, of you," Wallace said. "Tempest told me she couldn't talk about them because professors were around. Why would you ban your boyfriend from battling, he got attacked and burned because he didn't want to upset you! Do you know what kind of power that is?" he asked, a foreign anger burning inside him, he had to be careful not to squeeze Wink too much.

"She didn't have anything to do with Nat's case," Willow said. "Watch your tone."

"Sorry, Your Highness," Wallace said, giving Serena a half-assed bow. "This is stupid, I'm leaving, I don't know why I came here." Wallace shrugged and stepped from the stone slab, causing a few budew at his feet to scatter and rejoin their friends around Serena.

"Don't you want to know what the names mean?" Serena asked.

Wallace dug the toe of his flip-flop into the dirt between stones before he whirled back. "Your name is on there, and Nat's, and a bunch of other people."

"Willow and I didn't just come here to role play. Although I do like being worshiped by the budew." Serena stretched out and reached into her pocket before she tossed something at Willow. "Show him."

Willow nodded as she twirled whatever Serena had passed her between her fingers as she walked past Wallace. "Follow me. You can leave your totodile here, we're not going far."

Wallace tore his eyes from Serena who picked up a budew and let it dance along the edge of the chair. Wallace set Wink down on a stone slab that he smacked with his tail as he followed outside. She led him back to the panes of glass etched with words where she pulled out a glass cutter and started carving into a new square.

Waiting for an explanation, Wallace watched as Willow made slow and deliberate cuts into the glass. He tried to guess the words as she etched in each letter, but relented on waiting for her to finish. The process lasted over the course of several painfully quiet minutes until Willow blew against the glass and stood to admire her work.

"Here, start here," Willow said as she dragged her finger under the first glass pane.

Wallace crouched in front of the window and squinted at the carved words that seemed to have been done more roughly than the later entries. _Check Your Privilege_ was written in the top middle of the square and below it were the names of several students he'd never heard of.

"A bunch of upperclass assholes decided it would be fun to pick on a freshman who couldn't afford some of the nicer equipment and supplies for school," Willow announced, startling Wallace. "They knocked his stuff out of his hands, tore apart the few things he could afford, scratched up his Poké Balls, made him waste his potions and tormented him because he couldn't afford Arlan Pearce's trainer gear, or PokéView. The kid made an attempt on his life, but survived and rather than keep putting up with it he left at the end of the year to avoid another year of bullying. But not before he and his friend came to the Roses to make sure his bullies wouldn't just get away with it."

Wallace's head snapped up and met Willow's unwavering stare, the girl's eyes widened and she nodded, affirming her story was true. Wallace sighed and looked back to the glass. Below the first square the title _I Don't Choose You_ marked the glass in a similar style to the first along with the name _Nicole Phillips._

"A freshman girl had a crush on a junior girl after being friends for a while," Willow stated. "The freshman confessed her feelings to the junior, in front of her friends, and she rejected her. The junior was embarrassed after that and she stalked the freshman. She waited until she had a moment alone with her and she sent out all of her pokémon to attack and hurt the freshman. She was okay, she healed and came to the Roses to seek help. The previous leader tried the case and decided the junior was at fault."

"The case?" Wallace asked, unable to face Willow after hearing the story behind the second square.

"The Roses handle cases brought to them by students, always things done to them by other students," Willow said. "The Roses act like a judge and jury, an underground student government. We've got eyes and ears all across the school and we make decisions as a group."

"You and Serena?"

"No," Willow said. "The two of us are what you'd call the top of the totem pole. There are others below us who vote on cases, and some below them who act like little spies around campus."

"So what happened to the junior girl?" Wallace ran his hand over the glass square, tracing the grooves in the glass. "Nicole?"

"The Roses found her guilty and she was forced to turn over her pokémon to the university as part of a program where they would be released into the wild. She started her senior year with an all new team and couldn't keep her grades up. She dropped out. Keep reading."

Wallace dropped his head and swore under his breath as his hand fell to the third square down. _No Pictures Please_ and _Clayton Banks_ were the next series of words on the glass. "This one?" he asked, looking up to Willow.

Willow's chest expanded as she sucked in a breath and turned her attention elsewhere. "During Serena's freshman year she went to the back to school bonfire where she met Clayton Banks. He was a senior and took advantage of Serena, got her drunk and led her back to his dorm."

"Stop," Wallace gulped as he pressed his hand flat to the glass. "I can't hear this."

"Don't worry, it's got a happy ending," Willow said.

"Is this funny to you?" Wallace asked, staring at Willow's chin until she must have felt his eyes burning holes there because she turned back to meet his gaze. "You're telling me all this like you're reading it from a flier about bullying."

"It's not funny, far from it," she said. "But this is reality. Where boys take advantage of naïve nice girls and take them back to their dorms, drunk, and take pictures of them and then use them to shame and blackmail the girl. That's why the Roses exist, for girls like a freshman Serena Saint-Mars who have no where else to turn to."

"Why didn't she just go to a professor?" Wallace asked.

"With what proof?" Willow asked, shrugging. "Clayton never shared the pictures, no one can say for sure he took her back to his room. It was her word against his and he had her scared, scared the pictures could end up online or across campus with no way to trace them back to him if she said anything. So she came here, to the greenhouse and to the previous leader who found Clayton guilty and made him quit his extracurriculars and ruined any chance of him becoming a professional pokémon photographer without the blessing of the university behind him. Now, keep reading, it's gets better."

Wallace bit into his lip as he forced himself to turn back to the glass and found _Queer? Steer Clear_ along with _Nasturtium Freelily_ carved into the square. Wallace ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, wishing he didn't want to know, but as the crimes of students seemed to be worsening, he could only guess why Nat was on the list. "What is this?"

"Serena's boyfriend bullied a gay freshman to death," Willow said, colorlessly.

"What?"

"The boy was a friend of Nat's younger brother, Belladonna. Nat picked on and tormented the kid for being gay, relentlessly for a year. His friends joined in, all encouraged by Nat. The boy took his own life when he'd had enough. His parents had come looking for him after he'd stopped talking to them and they noticed he seemed off." Willow wiped at the corner of her eye, but her voice never faltered. "They found Don who took him to the boy's room where the three of them found the boy hanging from his overturned bed."

"And because of that Nat can't battle on campus," Wallace said, staring blankly at the ground. "Why – why would anyone agree to that? What stops them from breaking the Roses's rules?"

"Everyone kind of comes to an agreement it's for the best," Willow said. "The school doesn't do the best job in looking out for us, so the Roses' original leader took it into their hands to be there for the students. There's also a bit of fear behind it. What Nat did was terrible and he deserves worse than failing some classes for it, but he accepted that knowing that if he resisted the Roses could have gone to the police or the school and things have been made worse for him. It's not always, fair, but it's what we can do."

"How do you know so much?" Wallace asked. "You're a first year like me."

"I didn't stumble into the greenhouse and become Serena's lackey out of the blue," Willow said. "I saw recruitment fliers at the start of the year and had to learn all about the Roses and their cases to get where I am. You've got one more entry to read."

Wallace sucked in a deep breath to quell his rumbling stomach as he turned to the last entry, the one Willow had just carved. _Don't (Trust Me)_ was carved at the top and below it was _Azalea Foxe._ "Azalea?"

Willow nodded and crouched beside Wallace. "You know her, and the girl who brought us the case, Tempest. Turns out, after realizing Arlette Bellerose was Andrew Gates's girlfriend, Azalea became jealous and started leaving nasty notes for Arlette and even took it to the point of using her pokémon to blow up Arlette's window. Tempest brought the case to us and we've been working on it for a while now, we came to an agreement that Azalea's actions are way beyond reason."

"So what's her punishment?" Wallace asked.

"She aims to be the Kalos Queen," Willow said. "So Serena decided she would have to switch majors to something less glamorous that would deter her from performing. Starting tomorrow morning she's got a full day to begin the process of changing her major to breeding or her attack and assault on Arlette go to the authorities."

"You're altering people's lives," Wallace said. "After missing classes because he was attacked and not being able to battle, what if Nat can't ever graduate? I don't know what his goals are, but he might never achieve them."

"Nat's goals?" Willow asked, an arched brow cocking up before she stood and towered over him. "Nat's goals? What about the life of the boy he drove to kill himself? I know his parents probably had a lot of hopes for him, I'm sure he had goals of his own, but goal saw to an end of that!"

"Nat didn't kill him!" Wallace barked, shooting up and coming to eye level with Willow.

"Might as well have." Willow bumped her head against Wallace's, their eyes boring into each others. "Besides, it's not like everyone forgave him or thinks he was as innocent as you might. Belladonna is the one who brought the case before the Roses last year."

"What?" Wallace asked, backing away from Willow.

Willow nodded as she walked along the edge of the greenhouse and headed to the door. "That's right. Don felt his brother had gone too far and sought help from the Roses to have him punished. Speaking of Don," Willow said as she paused by the door and looked back to Wallace, her smile growing eerily wide. "I saw that sloppy make-out on the beach last week."

Wallace's nostrils flared as his cheeks burned up, despite the October chill.

"Is that why I haven't seen you around?" Willow asked. "I was sure you'd like to rub it in my face that I didn't get to post the video, but have you been hiding away, pining for him? Or are you scared to show your face because Andrew's last words were to: _Find Wallace._ " Willow threw her head back with a mighty laugh before she walked back into the greenhouse.

Fuming, Wallace stormed after her, ready to lay into her, but paused as Serena met them a few steps inside.

"Now that the big secret is out, any more questions?" Serena asked as she took off her rose crown and handed it off to Willow who biting her lip to quell her laughter.

"What makes you so special? Why do you get to decide these things?" Wallace asked, putting aside his fury at Willow for the time being.

"I don't do it alone, but I do it for the student benefit," Serena said. "Did she not explain this?" she asked, turning on her heels to Willow.

"I did," Willow said.

"You're ruining people's lives," Wallace said. "I know what those people did was terrible, but I – I don't know, it just seems wrong!"

"That's what she does, she ruins people," Willow cut-in. "Take Nat for example. He's a cutie. I'd try and steal him if he wasn't burned to the point of being damaged goods."

"Like your split ends?" Serena fired back over her shoulder. She turned and stalked around Willow, a predator sizing up her dinner.

Wallace watched Serena circle Willow, moving in closer to her with every loop until she gently bumped Willow and caused the white-haired girl to stumble off one of the stone paths.

"Don't talk about Nat, good or bad, from now on," Serena said as she locked her hands on her hips and loomed over Willow. Serena reached down and grabbed Willow's face, smashing together the girl's cheeks. "Or else you'll be watering my roses instead of Kit. Okay?"

Willow nodded before Serena released her and the raven haired girl twirled around and headed for the door.

"It's been a long day. See yourself out, Wallace," Serena said.

Wallace watched as Willow hurled the rose crown into the greenhouse before she hurried out the door after Serena, silent.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty Seven

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #26:** Do you think the Roses do more bad than good?


	28. Ice Cream

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Twenty Eight – Ice Cream**

 _This love is silent – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

A long slender lump moved through a blanket of orange and yellow leaves that coated the grass between two of the ICO's wings. As the lump carved a pattern through the leaves, a lumbering ludicolo kicked through piles of leaves groundskeepers had raked in hopes of tidying the yard. Two girls trudged through the leaves that swallowed their feet as they kept their distance, moving outside the range of the dancing ludicolo and the lump beneath the leaves.

Wallace flipped the rusty latch of the window above his bed and pushed the glass out, the hinges squeaking as the window opened. As he rested his arms on the sill of his window, Wallace narrowed his eyes on the girls below. They dressed alike, jeans and hoodies with their hair tucked into their hoods as they moved through the yard.

As the white-haired girl moved away from his building, Wallace made out Willow's face, her pale cheeks reddened by the autumn chill.

"Sienna, stop messing around with me," Willow said. "Polonium, wrap!"

A serpentine body shot from the leaves, its full body larger than the bulge in the leaves portrayed, as it lunged toward the ludicolo.

"You and seviper are too hasty," Sienna said as she moved in time with her ludicolo. "Use fake out."

Wallace watched the seviper's mouth come unhinged, large fangs bared at it neared ludicolo. Spinning, ludicolo smacked seviper out of the air, one of its large palms swatting the poison-type away. Seviper hit the ground and rolled, its body coiling as it tumbled through the leaves. Its body scrunched as it hissed at ludicolo who hadn't stopped dancing with Sienna.

"Swords dance," Sienna said as she hopped from foot to foot.

Ludicolo froze and threw its hands into the air and shook its whole body. "Co! Lo!"

"You and that stupid dancing tree," Willow said.

"Ludi isn't a tree, he's a dancing fruit," Sienna said.

"Whatever, Polonium, go for another wrap and follow it with poison fang."

"Viper!" Seviper's body flattened as it cut through the leaves and lunged for ludicolo again.

"Zen." Sienna stopped dancing as she moved behind ludicolo. "Wait for it, headbutt!"

Ludicolo tipped its body back, a glint of purple light crossing its forehead as seviper made another lunge for it. As seviper's mouth opened, ludicolo flung its body, its head smashing against seviper's and sending the poison-type shuddering back to the ground.

"Dragon tail!" Willow blurted.

Wallace watched the blade-like end of seviper's body flick into the air and swing over ludicolo.

Sienna spread her legs shoulder width a part and clapped her hands over her head. "Intercept!" she said.

Ludicolo mimicked its trainer's movement and clapped its hands overheard, catching seviper's tail. "Ludi!" it cried as it pulled on seviper's tail, but rather than throw the poison-type, ludicolo went back to dancing through the yard, dragging the flailing seviper behind it.

Wallace held back a laugh as he watched seviper make poor attempts at biting ludicolo, though the dancing pokémon paid it no mind. He turned his attention to Sienna who skipped through the grass, following ludicolo. As seviper tried to wriggle free, its thrashing body uncovered a rock in the yard that tripped Sienna, who managed to avoid falling face first.

Willow yowled, her hands clenched in front of her. "Sienna, this isn't a game, fight me!"

Despite her words, Wallace didn't think Willow was as upset with her sister as she seemed. Though Sienna seemed to toy with her sister and shrug off their battle, Willow's anger seemed phoned in.

"Garret, are professors supposed to fight students?" he asked. Wallace turned to find Garret sitting with his legs outside a blue kiddie pool he'd set in the middle of the floor.

In the pool, in a few inches of water, Wink thrashed in response to Garret blowing bubbles in the water with a straw. At Nurse Joie's suggestion, to keep Wink comfortable through colder months, he found find a place for Wink to swim in warm water to maintain his body temperature while his scales developed.

"Not normally," Garret said, dropping the straw from his lips. "But it's National Battle Day, didn't you get the email?"

Wallace puckered his lips and glanced to the expensive paper weight of his laptop on his desk. "Well..."

"Right," Garret laughed. "I forgot, you don't check your emails. I put a flyer about it on the dresser."

Wallace watched as Garret went back to teasing Wink with the straw as he searched their dresser and found a bright green flier beside Garret's television. As he looked over a pixelated design of two trainers facing each other with exclamation points over their heads, spinarak scaled the side of the television and nipped at the corner of the paper.

"October 22nd, National Battle Day. When two trainer's eyes meet, they must battle!" Wallace read aloud and then surrendered the paper to spinarak who dragged it behind the television. "Any trainers?" he asked as he stared at Garret and waited for him to meet his eyes.

"Well, the only exception is if both agree not to fight," he said, holding Wallace's stare for a second. "You can both decide you don't want to fight, but if you lock eyes with someone and they want to battle you should engage. No one is going to make you, but you should, it's all in the spirit of the holiday. Was someone battling outside?"

"Professor Oakburn and her little sister," Wallace said as he moved back to the window.

"What's her name?"

"Willow," Wallace said, below, the sisters threw their arms in the air as their pokémon clashed between them.

"Is she the one who wanted to post the video of Andrew?" Garret asked.

Wallace sighed onto the window, his breath fogging a blob of the glass. "Yeah," he said, watching as Willow's seviper circled ludicolo, its tail slicing through the leaves.

"I thought about you when they played the video, cause your name is Wallace too," Garret said.

"Yeah?" Wallace said again, his voice breaking on even the single syllable.

"It's just weird, hearing your name on the news all the time," Garret said. "It's all they show around campus. Different reports about the police looking for Arlan's son, but it doesn't look like anyone can find him and Arlan isn't saying anything. I heard the police are looking into him again, Arlan. I wonder why Wallace, Pearce, hasn't come forward, if he's Andrew's friend. Is it weird hearing your name like that?"

Wallace pressed his fingers into his eyes while Garret spoke, each word striking him deep, as if Garret knew the truth and patronized him with ignorance for fun. "Yeah," he said, at a loss for for anything else to say as stuffed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie pulled out a note he'd found taped to his door that morning. Thankful he saw it first. he unfolded the folded square and read the words inked in thick lines.

 **RICH BOY RICH BOY**

 **WALLACE WALLACE**

 **KILLING PEOPLE**

 **IN HIS MURDER PALACE**

Wallace pressed his knuckles into his temples and rubbed in circles, trying to clear the storm brewing beneath his skull. He couldn't help but think his daring trip back to the safari had triggered the note appearing on his door. If he was brave enough to approach Chara's hideaway, Chara could do the same to him. Though, as he looked over the note again, he couldn't shake the feeling that ominous and threatening notes weren't Chara's style.

Part of him, a part desensitized to fear, wished Chara would have busted through the door and finished what he started, if he had been the one to leave the note. In place of fear were the near paralyzing thoughts of what would happen if the search for Wallace Pearce reached the campus.

"You okay?" Garret asked.

Wallace cleared his throat and stuffed the note back into his pocket. He'd have to do his ritual later of ripping the note into pieces no bigger than confetti and discarding the remains in trashcans throughout the first and second floors, and maybe even one behind the building, the only surefire way to ensure no one found all the pieces.

"Headache," Wallace said, finding it easier to tell the truth, at least parts of it. Looking over his bed, and a sleeping elgyem who claimed a pillow to himself, Wallace took a seat beside the pool. He dipped his fingers into the warm water and splashed some at Wink, whose mouth cranked open as his tail splashed back.

Watching the water foam and calm, for a moment Wallace saw the baby blue bottom of the pool tinged with red as blood filled the water. Reactively, he splashed his hand across the top. The water missed Wink and sprayed Garret, dotting the butter yellow of his shirt as the sight of blood in the pool vanished in front of Wallace's eyes.

Garret drew in a sharp breath as he wiped water from his forehead and upper lip. "I should go," he said, standing and pulling at his shirt to inspect the water stains.

"I'm sorry," Wallace said, though it seemed moot as Garret started unrolling the legs of his pants. "I thought I saw something in the water."

"Neo's waiting for me," Garret said, as if he hadn't heard Wallace's apology. "C'mon, Amber," he said and pat his thigh, his mareep leaping off his bed and prancing across the floor toward him. "There's a battle show going on at the stadium later if you want to come."

Wallace sighed as the door shut and looked to his dresser. Spinarak had suspended the flyer in the corner of the dresser on a newly made web, and in the reflection of the mirror he saw that elgyem hadn't moved.

The month of October had flown by and Wallace had done his best to avoid his classes and all the emails his professors bombarded him with, urging him to return or risk failing. But the idea of facing people, regardless of their suspicions or opinions of him, kept Wallace hidden away, and his pokémon had become accustomed to their new lives as hermits.

"Just you and me, Wink." Wallace scooped a handful of water up and let it fall across Wink's back. The totodile hissed in response and Wallace wondered if the pool was big enough for him to sit in without breaking it.

Choosing to avoid the clean-up that breaking the pool might cause, Wallace slipped off his socks and climbed onto his bed, opting to dip his feet into the water that Wink saw as intrusions. Wink plopped on his belly and blew bubbles in the water as he nosed his way forward and bumped into Wallace's feet.

As Wink nipped and scratched at Wallace's toes, the water changed again. He watched drops of red hit the water and sink, leaving behind wispy strands of pink that turned the water orange against the blue base.

Rather than jerk at the sight, Wallace let his mind wander astray to the memory of a bloodied mouth and the rushing water of a river. The gush of the water rinsed blood from the mouth and turned the foam pink as the current carried it downstream.

* * *

 _Wallace shifted his focus from the fallen houndoom to what had saved them. Pyroar stood above the body of the houndoom, a chunk of bloody flesh in its mouth. Its body was bundles of muscles under a taut blanket of golden brown fur. Wallace narrowed his eyes to see past the intense burning mane at two great, savage, solemn, terrifying eyes; and he felt himself go weak with relief. "Mom," he whispered._

" _What?" Andrew shrieked as he laid on the trunk, his head whipping from side to side. "What's happening?"_

" _My mom!" Wallace cried out, braving to stand on the trunk at the presence of pyroar. Wallace watched the pyroar shift its attention toward him, but the sound of nails on wood made Wallace realize he wasn't the pyroar's concern.. Turning back, Wallace saw that pyroar's appearance hadn't deterred one of the houndoom that had taken the chance to creep further onto the fallen tree._

 _With its snout and chest a fan of blood, pyroar bounded across the shore in a few steps and stepped onto the end of the tree, a warning growl rumbling from its throat. Wallace felt the panic boiling in his chest as the two fire-types stared at each other, he and Andrew in the middle of what was to become their war zone.._

 _Andrew had been smart, flattening himself to the tree, making himself as small and insignificant as possible to the two beasts. The houndoom snarled and leaped overhead, its jaws opening as it flew toward pyroar._

 _Pyroar charged the tree and shook it with each of its powerful steps, but houndoom was smaller and Wallace watched its mouth clamp onto pyroar's front leg._

 _Pyroar bellowed as it jerked the houndoom, lifting the dual-type off its feet. Its igneous mane intensifying, pyroar twisted left and right as it shook houndoom like a rag doll. Too focused on the leg it had secured, houndoom didn't let go in time as pyroar slammed its body against a thick branch._

 _Houndoom's head snapped back, its jaws flapping open as it went wimp on the trunk, feet from Wallace. But the houndoom didn't rest, it sprung away from pyroar, but pyroar lunged in its path and with a quick flash of teeth, pyroar's mouth closed again the back of houndoom's neck._

 _Wallace flinched and covered his ears as houndoom let out a series of pained cries, its paws kicking haplessly through the air as pyroar lifted it._

 _Wallace's head shot toward the shore at the sound of branches snapping off, fearing other houndoom had found them. But not counting the corpse pyroar left on the shore, the other houndoom were nowhere insight. Wallace hoped they were more concerned for their lives than the hunt. Instead a woman and man charged through the trees, their bodies visible in glimpses before they broke the edge of the forest and sprinted across the shore._

 _The man wore khakis and a blue dress shirt and paused at the river's edge, scanning the water before he locked eyes with Wallace. "Camille, he's on the tree!"_

 _Wallace dropped back onto the trunk as his eyes swelled seeing his parents storming the shore._

" _Arlan, call Charles, tell him Andrew is okay." Camille Pearce dressed in dark jeans and shirt, a weathered leather jacket molded to her built frame as her boots bounded the bed of rocks alongside the river. "Wallace, stay where you are! I'm coming!" she yelled._

" _Mom!" Wallace yelped, tears spilling from his eyes as he clutched the tree for dear life._

" _Milo, finish it!" Camille said, stripping her jacket and boots as she ran. Kicking her last boot off, she lunged into the river._

 _Wallace heard a deep snap from behind him as Milo the pyroar released the motionless body of the houndoom. Though Milo laid the body on the trunk, the houndoom's lower half slipped from the tree and carried the rest of its body with it until it dropped into the river with a splash._

" _Hi, Milo," Wallace said in a quiet voice as he made himself smaller to the approaching pyroar. He lowered his gaze and watched Milo's great paws slap the trunk as he balanced without effort. Wallace ducked his head as pyroar's mouth came close to his neck and he felt the fire-type biting the back of his shirt, dragging him off the trunk._

 _Wallace kicked and scratched at the trunk out of fear until he felt a pair of arms encase him and he sank into the familiar scent of his mother's perfume. "God, if you ever do something so stupid again wild houndoom will be the least of your problems? Do you hear me?" Camille asked as she turned Wallace and pressed her hands into his cheeks, forcing their eyes to meet. "Say you understand. Say, I understand, Mom."_

" _IunderstandMom," Wallace said, with some difficulty as his mother made it hard to move his face._

" _Milo, take Andrew to shore," Camille said as she held Wallace to her chest, his legs wrapping her waist, and trudged through the water._

 _Wallace watched Milo treat Andrew like he was a cub and bite at the back of his shirt, nosing him across the trunk as they climbed off and met Arlan on the shore. Releasing Andrew to Arlan, Milo lowered his face to the river, mindful of his mane as he lapped water. Wallace watched as the river's rushing water washed away some of the blood coating Milo's face, the foam below Milo's face turning pink with the runoff._

* * *

Images of the cold day on the river swept from Wallace's mind as pricks of pain coming from his feet brought him back to the reality of Wink gnawing on his big toe.

"Ah, ah, ah," he whined as he tried to pry his foot from Wink's mouth, but the totodile hissed and thrashed his tail in response. "Wink, let me go, I'm not a snack." Wallace fell back on his bed and grabbed a rolled bag of food from his window that he jiggled in front of Wink.

He ripped a hole in the side of the bag and let a dozen pellets tumble out and float on the surface of the pool. Wink hissed as his good eye opened and he released Wallace, scanning the pool for his food. Careful to stand, Wallace slipped across his floor to his dresser and tossed a towel from his drawer to the floor to dry his feet.

Despite deliberately avoiding school events for the better part of a month, as he looked over the flier, the sound of feet stomping on cold bleachers and bundling in a sweatshirt to brave the autumn chill and ordering food from the concessions sounded like the perfect Saturday afternoon.

Grabbing a maroon sweatshirt with the school's emblem ironed onto the front, Wallace started to get ready, but a knock on his door stopped him. Slipping on socks and his sweatshirt, Wallace slid across the floor and pulled the door open. "He–llo," he said. His heart dipped in his chest at the frumpy girl in his doorway.

"Can, can I come in?" Arlette asked.

The sound of his heartbeat and the blood thundering through the veins in his ears deafened Wallace to the girl's question, and instead he stepped into the doorway, blocking her. "Garret's not here."

"That's good." Arlette nodded. Her eye that was never covered by strands of her hair focused on the floor. "I wanted to talk to you."

Patches of his skin pricked with heat as he felt sweat gathering on his arms and legs. "About what?"

"I've been thinking about you, since they played that video during the dance," Arlette's eye flicked from the floor, to the door, to Wallace's face, and to the doorframe as she spoke, the pieces of her body moving similarly. In front of her, her hands teased at a hole in her grey hoodie as she wrung her hands, popping her knuckles while her feet took turns digging the toes of her sneakers into the tile. "I had my suspicions before, but I know it now, who you are."

Straining to keep his face solid and unmoving like a mountainside, a different kind of storm brewed in his mind, one that stirred the piece of him that dismissed fear.

"I think you're Wallace Pearce, and I don't say that lightly" she said. "I've been thinking for weeks about everything. The last time I talked to Andrew, when I met you in Camphrier, everything the police have said about Andrew's disappearance, it's falling into place. Can you tell me why you're here? Why did you change your name?"

Wallace's nostrils flared as he swallowed, which felt like an admission of guilt, though he remained quiet, trying to hold Arlette's stare for as long as she dared for their eyes to meet. Desperately wishing for the conversation to change, his mind drifted to Garret's battle flyer, wondering if a battle would make Arlette forget her entire line of questioning and suspicion.

"I've tried to remember what you looked like when we first met, but I really can't. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of you before," Arlette said. "No one really knows what Wallace Pearce looks like, but you're all the news people are talking about, even though they don't have a picture of you to show. There are so many coincidences. Please, if I'm right, just talk to me. I have so many questions."

"You should go," Wallace managed to say, focusing on keeping his voice level as he moved to shut the door.

Arlette's hand shot out and touched the door, the action causing Wallace to flinch back, the sound startling him.

"Please," she said as she retracted her hand. "I don't want to bother you, but Andrew believed in you. He knew something bad was going to happen, he wanted you to be the one to remember him and not let Arlan do whatever he wanted. If everything Andrew was doing was true, if he had proof on things about Arlan, he wanted you to follow through."

A cramp in the pit of his stomach caused Wallace to hunch over and press his head to the edge of the door, the corner digging into his skin. "Arlette."

"He believed in you!" she said, stronger. "And if you are who I think you are, I believe in you too. I know we're not friends and things haven't been good between us, but none of that has to matter anymore. Maybe you left home because you were scared or this was part of a plan you and him had, but it doesn't matter, nothing matters except the truth. He deserves that. If you are who I think you are, then you had to care about him, just like I did."

"I, I can't – you don't understand."

"Make me understand," Arlette pleaded as she took a step inside and grabbed him. Arlette held Wallace's hand in her own small hands, the smooth pads of her fingers running across his knuckles.

Wallace stepped back, Arlette following him, but as he fought the urge to let her inside, the truth formed in the back of his throat as he tried to find the right combination of words to tell her the truth in one sentence. "Arlette, I'm –"

"You exist, you're real, you're a part of his past," she said, squeezing his hand. "We can do this together. Finish what Andrew started or at least get justice for him. Maybe we can help each other, fill in some blanks. I mean, Andrew never mentioned you and I didn't really think he had friends back home and that's why he traveled so much. When he told me he was coming back to Kalos he didn't mention a friend or his family, so maybe I can fill in more blanks than you can."

Although he found reassurance his new identity would remain safe by the lack of his existence in any of Arlette's diary entries, hearing the words come from her mouth, Wallace felt the storm dying away, replaced instead by an anger for her. He pulled his hand back and made a show of wiping the back of his hand across his jeans. "I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about," he said, dryly.

"What? Wait, what?" Arlette asked, vigor and intensity in her voice fading. "What? Wallace?"

Wallace swallowed and wet his lips as he shook his head. His poker face shattered and he replaced it with a guise of confusion and dismissal, his brows knitting and his lips curling. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said again, slower for her benefit. "I've never met Andrew, and I'm not Wallace Pearce. It's tragic, what happened to him, and I hope they do find his friend, but despite our names, that's just not me. I don't know why you're stuck on me and why you think I have anything to do with what happened, but I think you should let it go." Wallace took in a long breath that quelled the rumbling in his gut as he watched Arlette's eye grow watery. "I think you should leave, like I said, Garret isn't here."

Basking in the look of defeat that flooded Arlette's face, Wallace shut the door on her. He stood there for a breath, watching two shadows beneath his door, her feet, unmoving. Rolling his eyes, he stepped away from the door and crossed his room, raking his hands through his hair and clawing at his face. "Ugh!" he grunted.

He took to walking the perimeter of Wink's pool, grinding the bones in his palms until his phone buzzed on his dresser. He grabbed it, but didn't stop his ring around the pool, and opened a new notification of a message from Tempest.

 **Tempest:** _OMG. So it turns out azalea_ _foxe_ _was the one who blew up our window. The Roses made her change her major. Someone saw her in their breeding class yesterday and I just heard from a friend she was crying about it in the basement this morning._ _Can't believe it._

Wallace sighed, sucking in air to calm himself as he went to reply, but glimpsed back to his door and the shadows at the bottom of the floor. "Take a fucking hint," he growled as he threw his phone on his bed and stormed to his door. Twisting the knob and pulling the door open with excessive force, a bellow started in his chest, expecting to find Arlette outside, but it was Don who stood on the other side, fist held in the air, interrupted mid-knock.

Wallace's anger evaporated, leaving him numb for a moment as he took in the sight of Don. The typical bright boy looked disheveled with strands of his hair standing at odd points and dark circles haloing his eyes. "Hi," Wallace breathed, the taste of tainted berries and alcohol buzzing in the back of his throat as the memory flashed back to his mind.

Like Arlette, Don's eyes darted in their sockets to keep eye contact to a minimum as he shuffled from left to right on his feet. "Can I come in?" he asked.

"Sure," Wallace said as he pulled the door open. "Ignore the pool," he said, his words catching in his throat that had dried again.

Don choked on a laugh as he walked by the pool and bent to pet Wink. After what felt like a dragged out distraction, Don stood and faced the wall, away from Wallace. "I'm sorry," he blurted and turned, his hands out and grasping at air. "There, I said it. I'm sorry. So incredibly sorry and embarrassed and mortified that it literally took Cosmo holding my hand to get me to the third floor of this building."

Wallace bit his tongue as he watched Don's face come to life, his eyes growing wide and his mouth flapping as he babbled.

"I was out of my mind at the dance and you told me to leave and I _forced_ myself on you," Don said, his voice breaking as he said the last part, his eyes falling from Wallace's face. Don's arms came back to his side and he wrapped them across his mid-section, hugging himself.

"Thank you," Wallace said as he walked along his dresser, keeping his distance from Don as he walked toward his window. Sienna and Willow were below, a sawsbuck and a leafeon prancing through the leaves between them. "It was Cole's fault. That punch he was serving, that's what made me sick," he said, opting to ignore the donphan of Andrew's video in the room. "I just – don't want you to feel bad, if that makes sense?"

"Yeah, the punch," Don said, his voice trailing off. "I can't say I'm sorry enough. I'm so selfish, I just thought... You liked guys, maybe you do and you just don't like me. I swear, I'm so stupid and selfish. I'm really sorry. I should have known, I heard you liked Tempest, but then I saw her dancing with someone else and – that doesn't even matter," Don scoffed and let out a low laugh. "Ellie told me you and Azalea were together before the dance and you were dancing with her at the dance. God, why am I like this?"

Wallace focused on the shaking antler's of Sienna's sawsbuck as he listened to Don choke out a sob, followed by the sound of footfalls. Wallace tensed, thinking Don was going to approach him, but with a look over his shoulder he saw Don heading for the door.

"I like ice cream," Wallace said, awkward and loud the way it filled his room and bounced back into his own ears. He listened to Don's footsteps slow as the knob to his door twisted. "I like frozen yogurt too, but I like ice cream more."

"What?" Don asked.

"I like Tempest." Wallace pressed his hands to his stomach as he inhaled, trying to quell the unease bubbling in his chest and the fluttering in his gut. Fighting the urge to face him, Wallace locked sights onto Willow's leafeon who danced by sawsbuck, kicking leaves as it moved. "And I almost kissed Azalea."

"Oh. I didn't know that," Don said, his voice faint and broken between gasps of air.

Wallace wet his lips as he heard the hinges of his door creaking. "I like girls, but I've never kissed one. So I can't really say what that feels like. But being around girls, being around Tempest and Azalea, dancing with her, it feels like having the best spoonful of frozen yogurt," he said with a slight laugh as he pressed into his stomach, physically hoping to calm the fluttering in his gut. "It's sweet, and good, and almost like an electric sensation. But even though I was drunk and not feeling well," Wallace let out several short huffs of air and stained himself to focus on the battle below. "I remember what it felt like when you kissed me, it was like ice cream," he said as his eyes crawled from the battle and he spared a glance over his shoulder to Don who clutched the knob and the frame of the door, eyes wide. "I like ice cream."

Wallace watched Don's hands fall from the door and clasp in front of his chest as he pulled at his fingers and rubbed his hands. "Oh?" he asked.

"I'm really sorry for throwing up," Wallace said. "I was having the worse night, I can't imagine what you've been going through since that night, let alone the fact it was your first time on campus since Nat was attacked. I've barely left my room and it was hard to get out of bed because – life is just rough right now. I'm new to people, to dealing with people and their feelings and I should have talked to you before now, to tell you not to feel bad."

Don bobbed his head and opened his mouth, letting out a wet choking sound. Sputtering, he turned and swiped at his eyes. "Um, there's a battle thing, battle event going on at the stadium, um it's today. Were you going?"

"Yeah, I was going to head over," Wallace said, braving a step toward him.

"Okay." Don wet his lips and ducked his head. "Maybe I'll, maybe I'll see you there?"

"Or we could go over together?" Wallace asked.

Don flashed his teeth as he smiled and nodded and let out a soft chuckle. "O-Okay."

* * *

The sun was on the verge of setting when Don and Wallace made their way to the stands. The normalcy of the whole thing, joining his classmates following a month of seclusion with elgyem on his shoulder and spinarak dangling from his chest, it was as if the night of homecoming hadn't happened, though Don walking ahead of him, looking back and grinning at him, was a clear sign that something had changed.

Following Don, Wallace spotted Garret and Neo sitting near the top of the steps with Eleanor. With a sizable gap between them was Cosmo with a small device pressed to his face.

"You didn't bring a telescope," Don said as he climbed over his brother's legs and took a seat.

Cosmo smiled as and pressed a retractable telescope to his knee, condensing it. "Of course I did, the stars wait for no man," he said as he extended the telescope and turned his attention to the sky as Wallace crossed in front of him. "Oh, hi Wallace," he said, his face splitting into a grin.

"Hi," he said, taking a seat between Don and Eleanor.

Eleanor leaned over, pressing her weight into Wallace and pinched his leg. "Hey," she said, smiling.

"Hi?" he asked, narrowing his eyes at her overly cheerful tone. "What's up?"

Eleanor smiled, the lines in her face deepening near the scar on her cheek. "You're out of your room," she said. "I'm happy."

"Yeah," Wallace said, casting his eyes across the arena field and taking in a deep breath of the chilled air. "So, who's battling?"

"It's random," Neo said. "Remember the first tournament of the year? It's like that. They call names for different battle sets. Your friend Johnny just got off the field, he beat Persia."

The crack of a loudspeaker split the air and quelled the crowd's chatter and a voice echoed across the stadium. "Hi everyone! I'm Professor Summers, but you can call me Professor Vivi! I just wanted to thank you students for that last battle, and all the battles today! You're all so awesome! We've pulled the next set of rules and participants! Our next battle is a double battle!" Though the professors's voice vanished from the speakers, the sound of papers shuffling her whispers could still be heard. "Oh my gosh, this is so exciting," she said, followed by a loud squeeing sound. "Okay! The participants for team red are: Cosmo Freelily and Ignatius Mercer. And for team blue: Arlette Bellerose and Shannon Oxton. Students, please take the field! I'm so excited!"

Wallace looked past Don, whose eyes were on him, as he saw Cosmo drop the telescope from his face. "Looks like you're up."

Cosmo sighed and slumped over. "Hold my stargazer," he said, thrusting his telescope into Don's chest.

As Wallace watched Cosmo climb the steps he saw a few other heads raise from the stands. The back of Ignatius' hat rose above the crowd as he shuffled toward the aisle. Shannon's chocolate brown locks bounced as she darted to the steps. Near the bottom of the bleachers he saw Arlette stand and inch her way to the balcony as the others surrounded her and the four of them vanished on the steps, reappearing on the field below.

Turning to the scoreboard, Wallace watched the screen come to life with two split views as the teams took their sides of the field. Focusing on Arlette and Shannon he saw the reluctance on Arlette's face as she looked left and right, looking out of place at the center of attention. Scanning the other side of the screen he saw Ignatius and Cosmo talking, in his periphery he caught Don's eyes on him again. "What?" he laughed, rubbing the side of his face.

Don pursed his lips and shook his head as he fiddled with Cosmo's telescope. "Nothing."

Wallace narrowed his eyes at Don, holding back a smile as a whistle signaled the start of the battle.

"RedShot!" The camera focused on Ignatius who tossed a ball into the air that released a zangoose with course-looking fur beside him.

A flash of light beside Ignatius pulled the camera to the right as an altaria landed beside Cosmo who wasted no time in burying himself into its fluffy wings. "Nimbus!" he cried, his voice muffled.

On the upper half of the screen, a dark blue meowstic with white accents rubbed against Arlette's side and a rowdy darmanitan beat the ground in front of Shannon.

"Iggy!" Shannon sang out, waving her hand across the field to Ignatius. "It kills me we're not fighting on the same side."

"I can't relate," Ignatius said. "RedShot, use hone claws, follow up with slash."

The zangoose pushed off from the ground, standing beside its trainer, as it clashed its claws. The camera zoomed on zangoose, catching its shifting eyes darting between its two targets. It lowered itself to the ground and darted across the arena.

"Bleu, can you stop him with psychic?" Arlette asked as she rubbed the top of her meowstic's head.

Meowstic pushed on its toes into Arlette's hand as the microphones on the field picked up its loud purring. The blues of meowstic's eyes shone bright as it raised its arms to the dashing zangoose and stopped its movements as blue light haloed the normal-type's body.

"Nice work," Shannon said with a snap. "Fahrenheit, use hammer arm while we've got the opening."

"Man, man!" Darmanitan threw its fists into the air and slammed them down, throwing itself into the air toward the frozen zangoose. Raising its fists overhead, darmanitan's shadow fell over zangoose as a ball of white light shot across the field, slamming into darmanitan's side, throwing it off course.

The crowd gasped as the camera focused on Cosmo and his altaria, whose body glowed with the fading light of an attack.

"What was that?" Shannon asked as she ran toward her fallen darmanitan and helped him stand.

"Moonblast!" Cosmo said, pointing to the sky. "Do it again, Nimbus."

Altaria fluttered its wings as it pointed its neck to the sky and emitted a singsong cry, another gleaming ball of light gathering above the field.

"Arlette, can you back me up?" Shannon asked, eyes shifting from her partner to altaria's attack.

"I can try," Arlette said as she rubbed meowstic's ears.

"Good, Fahrenheit, we're gonna put it on all the line, go for belly drum," Shannon said.

Darmanitan leaped from side to side as it smacked its stomach with its hands, a low bellowing sound filling the stadium with darmanitan's cries.

"Bleu, use heal bell," Arlette said.

Turning in a slow circle, meowstic touched its hands over its head causing ripples to break the air. "Meow!" he purred as his body glimmered with blue light that covered darmanitan whose hopping stopped.

"Fire," Cosmo said, aiming a finger gun toward Shannon's fire-type.

"RedShot, go for fury cutter, this time on meowstic," Ignatius said.

"Go for a flare blitz, the target is your choice, Fahrenheit," Shannon said, flipping back a lock of her hair.

Darmanitan slammed its fists onto the ground, growling, as blue flames licked its red fur and it enveloped its body. Grabbing the ground, darmanitan threw itself like a slingshot, a line of fire following it as it zipped across the field, heading straight for altaria.

"Bleu, try and dodge the zangoose!" Arlette gasped.

Meowstic lowered itself to the ground as it faced the incoming zangoose, but as the charging normal-type passed darmanitan, the fire-type altered its course, digging its feet into the ground and hurling its body sideways, slamming into zangoose.

Shannon shielded her face as altaria's moonblast tore across the field, singeing away grass prior to dissipated several yards away from Shannon.

Zangoose and darmanitan tumbled in a mass of fire across the field until zangoose leaped up and darmanitan got to its feet and they began trade blows. The camera picked caught their mini-battle as darmanitan made sweeping blows with it arms, each of which the zangoose blocked or deflected its with claws.

"Slash!" Ignatius called out.

One of zangoose's claws shone under the stadium light as it raised it above darmanitan, catching the fire-type in between attacks. As zangoose's claw came for darmanitan, a glint of blue light covered each of the pokémon and pulsed them apart, causing zangoose's claw to cut harmlessly through the air.

"Dragon pulse!" Cosmo said.

Pulling away from darmanitan and zangoose, the camera caught a glint of multi-colored light vanishing inside altaria's mouth. Shannon said something that called darmanitan back to her side and Arlette had meowstic rushing onto the field as altaria's spat her attack out.

As it touched the grass, the figure of a serpentine dragon exploded across the field, the gradients of its body sending colored streaks in all directions as the dragon pulse rushed toward meowstic.

"Misty terrain," Arlette said, hands clasped in front of her chest.

Meowstic twirled on the spot, raising its arms toward the incoming attack as pink fog lifted from the grass, coating the arena in a seconds. As the beam of altaria's dragon pulse drew closer to its target its size began to diminish, shrinking into naught.

"Aww," Cosmo said, rubbing altaria's side. "Well, at least we tried."

"Don't say aww, it's not over yet," Ignatius said. "RedShot, another fury cutter!"

Arlette gasped as she scanned the field, most of the grass out of sight under the pink mist, along with Ignatius' zangoose. A break in the fog pulled her attention to a spot on the field behind meowstic as zangoose burst into the air, using the cover of the fog to hide its movements.

Zangoose landed with a loud thud that blew away a circle of the fog. Without waiting for meowstic to turn, zangoose launched itself to its target and plunged its claws into meowstic's back and tugged to the side, the camera caught the arc of blood and fur that zangoose ripped from meowstic.

"Bleu!" Arlette shrieked as she ran onto the field, causing a gasp to break out from the crowd.

"Get out of the way!" Shannon said as darmanitan charged onto the field, its fists and feet pounding past Arlette.

Arlette flinched back as darmanitan passed her, but didn't stop running. She swerved past darmanitan and zangoose who rolled through the pink fog, arms and claws clashing as she reached meowstic who had fallen below the mist.

"Nimbus, use the misty terrain to boost your moonblast," Cosmo said as he climbed onto his altaria's back. "But watch out for Arlette."

"Aria!" Altaria cried, spreading its wings as it took flight, a ball of light gathering above it as it soared across the field.

"Dummy, get off the field!" Don hissed as he extended Cosmo's telescope and followed altaria's path of flight.

Altaria let loose another singsong cry andfired its moonblast toward the ground. Darmanitan leaped away from its path, leaping over Arlette and Bleu, but zangoose darted close to the shadow of the moonblast that exploded against the ground behind it.

Bracing for the explosion, zangoose launched across the field, propelling it toward the fleeing darmanitan. Reaching the fire-type, zangoose slammed into its back and sent darmanitan tumbling. As darmanitan fell flat on its stomach, zangoose ran for it and climbed into its back.

"Crush claw!" Ignatius said.

"Zan!" Zangoose raised both of its arms, its claws glowing white, and it lowered them over darmanitan's back, but a burst of blue light tossed zangoose off.

Arlette fell back onto the ground as her meowstic stood, panting with its eyes pinched shut. "Bleu, you okay?" she asked, wiping the corners of her eyes.

Meowstic nodded to his trainer as it walked, laggard and with a limp, to rejoin the fight. But after a few steps, a round shadow fell over its body.

"Fire!" Cosmo yelled.

A moonblast, the size of an exercise ball, shattered against the ground behind meowstic, throwing the psychic-type across the field.

"Bleu!" Arlette cried as she got to her feet and ran through the dissolving mist of Cosmo's attack.

"RedShot, fury cutter again, put meowstic down," Ignatius said, running alongside the shifting action.

Zangoose leaped over darmanitan, its claws shining as it raced toward meowstic who had gotten back to his feet. Zangoose lunged for him, its claw slicing meowstic and cutting a gash across the psychic-type's chest.

Meowstic cried out as he staggered back, his eyes glowing blue and coating zangoose in the same light, but the normal-type hissed and seemed to break free from the hold.

"Flare blitz!"

A sizzling sound from the ground caught zangoose's attention as a blue-fire missile shot toward it. Zangoose dove to the side, the flying darmanitan shooting past meowstic and slamming back into the ground.

As meowstic fell to one knee, zangoose charged it again, its claw cutting deeper across meowstic's chest, another arc of blood flying through the air.

"Stop!" Arlette wheezed as she sprinted to reach meowstic.

"Arlette, get off the field!" Shannon yelled, hands cupped to her mouth.

"Keep going, more fury cutters," Ignatius said.

Zangoose darted across the ground on all fours, dipping past meowstic who struggled to focused on its movements, half concealed beneath the fog. Without the strength to fight back or dodge, meowstic was victim to zangoose driving its claws into its body.

Darmanitan propelled itself overhead, landing beside zangoose and took one of zangoose's slashes to its forearm as it began swinging its arms. Zangoose bobbed out of range of darmanitan's retarded blows. Zangoose deflected one of its arms with its claws and took the chance to slice across darmanitan's arm.

Ignatius moved in closer to the action, fanning away the misty terrain. "Crush claw!"

Ducking, zangoose avoided another swing from darmanitan and it climbed its back and jumped off. Zangoose's claws shone as it came down over darmanitan and slammed onto its arm as it tried to block. A sickening crunch filled the stadium and earned a gasp from the crowd as the pink fog filled the air, obscuring the camera's from seeing the result.

"Look!" someone shouted a few rows below Wallace.

Wallace stood from his seat and narrowed his eyes at the cloud of pink mist, trying to make out any shapes, but people in the stands had their eyes focusing on another part of the field.

"Oh my god," Don breathed as he handed the telescope to Wallace and pointed toward the left corner.

While the camera tried to find what everyone else had noticed, Wallace pulled the telescope to his eye and focused on the corner of the stadium, to someone stepping onto the field. His jaw fell and blood ran cold at the sight of someone dressed in a dark suit with blonde hair and blood coating half of their face, stumbling onto the field.

The crack of the sound system filled the stadium again, but rather than Professor Summer's voice, a different one came through. "This could be my last video ever, I can't look crazy." The voice paused and a disembodied laugh boomed from the speakers. "Um, if I can't delete this, if I don't come out, if I go missing... If I die... If I die... If I die... If I die."

Wallace lowered the telescope as the audio from Andrew's final video played through the stadium's sound system, but kept pausing and replaying certain parts, like a twisted remix.

"Step on the little people, little people... make them feel like they don't m-m-m-matter... Easily forgotten... Something happens to me... you... want to know what happened and would want justice for me. But... If I die... If I die... If I die... He's my best friend... get away with making me disappear... If I die... If I die... If I die... Find Wallace."

Hushed conversations broke out through the bleachers like wildfires and Wallace saw people turning in their seats to find him in the crowd, an easy task as he was the only one standing. With knees turning into goo, Wallace dropped onto the bench and flinched as he felt a hand land on his back and rub in a circle. Beside him Eleanor had her hands to her mouth and Neo was on his feet, tablet aimed at the field. Beside him Don's face knitted with worry.

Wallace's eyes darted from Don to the scoreboard, the camera had focused on the person walking across the field. Across their chest was a hanging tag that read: _Hi, my name is... Andrew_. Two large men charged onto the field and ran toward the fake-Andrew, all for the camera to see. One of them tried to grab them, but fake-Andrew dodged and all the man came away with was a blonde wig as a boy with dark hair sprinted away from them, the look on his face deranged.

The sound system came back to life, but with Professor Summers' voice. "Um, I'm sooo sorry!," she trilled. "I don't know what – I apologize for the interruption but – _If I die... If I die... If I die..._ "

The students gasped and started screaming as Professor Summers' voice cut out and Andrew's overlapped through the speakers again. A group of girls flew out of their seats and ran from the bleachers, sparking similar responses from others. Students screamed and fled to the steps, making an exit from the stadium as the boy on the field evaded the two men chasing him.

"Please – _if I die_ – leave the stadium in an orderly manner – _if I die –_ today's battle event is cancelled, please return to your dorms," Professor Summers said, between interruptions.

Brushing past Don, Wallace stumbled into the aisle, dropping Cosmo's telescope on the ground. With a hand on elgyem's leg to keep the psychic-type from flying off, he ignored the sound of glass shattering as he tripped on the steps, falling in line with a horde of other students, all flocking to the bottom row. Behind him he heard Garret and Neo's voices, along with Eleanor and Don behind him.

Following the wave of students who ran from the stadium, Wallace followed the ramp that led him to the pathway outside the stadium. Heart pounding so hard the veins in his eyes thumped, Wallace made out the sight of Willow standing against a stone pillar, his eyes focusing on her face when a pair of hands fell on his shoulders.

Elgyem slid off Wallace's shoulder, falling down his back and came floating back up, flashing his red lights at Johnny. "Elgy!" he beeped.

"Wallace, something happened," Johnny said, panting, as he hung his head.

Wallace thought his heart might have actually skipped a beat at Johnny's sudden appearance, a jump scare during the rising action of the endless horror movie that was his life. "What?" he gasped, trying to focus on the boy in front of him.

"It's Nat," Johnny said, wheezing.

"Did you say Nat?" Don asked, slamming into Wallace's side. "What happened, is he okay? What happened?"

"He's fine, he's fine, for the most part," Johnny said, his voice light before he hunched over and gulped air. He looked up, letting go of Wallace as he sucked in air. "I ran all the way here... I went to the clinic after my battle and all the nurses in his unit were running around crazy, they said he pressed the emergency button and when they got to his room he was out of his bed, on the floor, completely detached from his machines."

Wallace swallowed hard as he watched Don run his fingers through his hair and bite his lip. He held his arms out and elgyem floated back into his grasp. He pulled the psychic-type close and stroked his head, a nerve tick as his heart didn't have a moment of rest.

"No, no, no, is he okay?" Don asked as he started pacing. "I have to go to him!"

Johnny's hands slammed onto Don's shoulders to steady the boy. "He's fine, they got him back in bed, nothing's wrong. They said it's not impossible for someone to fall out of their bed and end up on the floor."

"So what, did he roll out?" Wallace asked, his head pounding, the veins in his eyes blooming black across his vision and blinding him to parts of Johnny's face. To focus, he pressed his fingers against the colored pads of elgyem's hands, counting to three in his head each time.

Johnny shook his head. "The head nurse said the state of the room looked weird. The sheets were untucked and rolled up on the bed, like someone grabbed them and pulled them up to roll Nat out. She said all his IVs looked like they'd been unplugged and left to hang, unlike if they'd come out because Nat pulled them out when he fell." Johnny explained. "They think someone unplugged him from his machines and rolled him to the floor," he said, his eyes shifting between the boys.

"He was attacked?" Wallace asked, his voice falling faint as the idea of the Orphans on campus.

"They think so," Johnny said, his hands tightening on Don's shoulders. "But no one was around when they got there and Nat didn't say much, just mumblings."

"What did he say? Did he see who did it?" Don asked, fighting to shake off Johnny's hands. "Let me go, I need to see my brother!"

"They're not going to let you, they put him on a special watch. They barely let his nurse into his room, he's blocked by guards," Johnny said, pushing Don back.

"Johnny, what did he say?" Wallace asked, louder.

"It's nothing, it's not important," Johnny said, shaking his head. "Just mumbles."

"What did he say?" Don yelled, grabbing Johnny by the shoulders as the two fought to overpower the other.

Johnny's eyes went wide as he shrugged off Don's hands and let go of him in return. "He just said: 'T _ell him there are five of them'_ that's it."

Don's eyes narrowed, his mouth curled up as he bared his teeth. "What? What does that even mean? "Five? Five what?" he asked.

Johnny held Don's gaze and shook his head. "Orphans, he said there were five orphans, but I don't know what that means. Like I said, just mumbles," he said, shrugging.

An icy prickling sensation crawled Wallace's back, raising the hairs on his arm as he turned. The feeling of ice frosting across the back of his neck made Wallace turn, an odd sort of magnetism directing him as to where to look. Though he expected her to be long gone, he found Willow still propped against the pillar, waving at him. "Is this funny to you?" he asked, loud enough students still fleeing the stadium paused and gave him a double take. Ushering elgyem to his shoulder, Wallace moved past Don and crossed the path to Willow who dropped her arm, the smile on her face falling. "Is it funny to you?" he asked, louder still as he got into her face, pinning her against the pillar with his body, mindful of spinarak hanging between them. Elgyem's hands jabbed in Willow's direction, the red lights flashing in her face.

Willow's eyes, fractured mixtures of yellows and browns that layered into orange, turned down as she cast glances around her as students stopped to stare. "W-Wallace, you're making a scene," she said, her eyes flicking from Wallace to elgyem.

"I'll make one," he growled, holding her eyes, though she wouldn't look back at him. "This was you," he said. "The audio. No one else had the video, you were upset you didn't get to post it."

Willow's eyes flicked to his before they fell to his lips and across his other features. "Shouldn't I be?" she asked, her voice a whisper. "Mad, that is. I had a plan, and someone went and pulled the rug from under my feet."

"Not _someone_ , his parents!" Wallace said. "You said you wanted to post the video for the right reasons, no, they did! You're just selfish and get some weird kick out of this."

"Everyone has a hobby," Willow said, her eyes dipping away from his face as she tried to push past him.

Wallace slammed his hand flat against the pillar, blocking her between his arms as he leaned in and rested his chin on her shoulder. "In my room, there's a folder, and it's labeled Oakburn. Willow Oakburn, went to a trainer school here in Kalos. Your dad died in a work accident and a crash killed your siblings. The scars on your face, they're from that day, right?" he asked, grazing the back of his hand across her cheek as he pulled back to find her glossy eyes.

"H-How," she breathed, tears spilling the lower lids of her eyes before she wiped at her face and coughed. "How do you know that? You shouldn't –"

"Your mom died too, making you an orphan," Wallace said, cutting her off. "Is that how it works? You're alone and you join up with them? Chara, James, the others... You become an orphan and then you're an _Orphan_? Why me?"

Willow bit at her lip, her eyes darting from side to side. "I don't know what you're talking about, let me go," she said as she made another attempt to leave, but was blocked by Wallace's arms.

"Why are you going after Nat?" he asked, leaning in close again. "You work for the Roses. Serena is supposed to be your friend. They _burned_ him! How could you do this?"

Willow's stare hardened. "It wasn't my choice," she said. "I'm not like the others, I don't work with them. Why Chara is obsessed with you, I don't know. Why the others follow him, I don't know, but I guess it has to do with fear. That's why I did what I did."

"What did you do?" he asked through gritted teeth, his palms slapping the pillar.

"People are staring," Willow said, her eyes low and still scanning the sidelines.

"What did you do?" he asked, louder, blind to the crowd of students who had gathered around them.

"I sent a message," she growled. "Okay? They wanted me to send you a message, that every action has a reaction. Chara wanted you, but you involved Eleanor, so she's a target. You avoided them in the stadium, so they attacked Nat. You visited the safari, ran from James, so I unplugged Nat and roughed him up. I told you, I don't know why they want you, but stop running, or else everyone you care about is fair game."

Wallace's arms fell from the pillar, unblocking Willow, though she didn't take the opening to run. "Is that a threat?" he asked, the base and bravado fading from his voice.

"It doesn't come from me," Willow said, shrugging and adjusting her hoodie. "I said it, I'm not like the others."

"You're just as bad," he quipped. "How many more of you are there?"

"Just us," Willow said and fingered a strand of her white-blonde hair behind her ear.

"How many is us?" he asked, his voice raising. "Nat told me four, now five? Johnny just said that was all Nat could say, that there were five of you, his only words were a warning to me!"

"Wallace?" Don asked. "Is everything okay?"

"You said you don't know why he's obsessed with me," Wallace said, throwing a look over his shoulder to Don and Johnny, along with a horde of students were slowly walking past, trying to catch a bit of the drama.

"I don't," Willow said. "They just tell me where to go, what to do. I don't go to the safari, I don't keep in contact."

"Did they give you the video?" Wallace asked.

"Something like that," Willow said.

"Why do you work with them?" Wallace asked.

"You wouldn't understand," Willow shrugged.

"Make me understand," he said, borrowing Arlette's words. "Do you have a heart? You had a family, you have your sister, you can't be that cold. Do you care that they're murderers and stalkers? Tell me something!"

"I'm not a murder or a stalker." Willow rolled her eyes and scoffed. "Wallace, I let you dance on me at homecoming, but we're not friends. Stop asking questions, you're dipping your toes into an ocean, Wallace, not a rain puddle. I don't know why Chara is so focused on you, but I know it wasn't always like that. I know he wasn't in the safari by chance, you're a target, a job."

"A job? For who?" Wallace rubbed his eyes, his vision blooming in neon colors. "Why do they want me? What would happened if I told your sister? Or the university, about what you've done," Wallace said.

"Do you have proof?" Willow asked before she held her arms out, her knuckles touching. "Are you going to arrest me for being bad?" she said, pouting. "I don't think so, because something tells me you're not a fan of law enforcement. The Orphans don't target civilians like that, it's a system, orders come from somewhere. They wouldn't have targeted you for no reason, someone wants you to suffer, or to pay, or to be miserable, I don't know. But we'll never find out if you keep dodging them."

"So I let them take me? Hurt me? Kill me?" Wallace asked, his voice breaking and squeaking. "To save the people around me?"

Willow stepped off the pillar and shrugged. "Not my concern, just don't shoot the messenger," she said as she patted his chest, waved to elgyem, and walked away. "Belladonna, give my regards to Nat."

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty Eight

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #27:** Do you think Willow will be a key for Wallace to unlock the secrets of the Orphans?


	29. Better the Devil You Know

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Twenty Nine – Better the Devil You Know**

 _We must learn to suffer more – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

 _Wallace's breath died in his chest as he rounded the corner of his building. At least a dozen students huddled under the glow of a light that hung from the building, casting golden light off their shoulders. He watched them exchange glances in between turning their heads toward the ground._

 _His stomach cramped and seized as he tried to breathe, air shuddering through his throat and hammering his lungs as he forced himself from the wall. With clumsy and loud steps, Wallace approached the group and used his fingers to hold open his eyes, stretching the skin of eyes sockets open until he felt the night air drying out his eyes._

 _Several feet from the crowd he started blinking, his eyes watering to compensate for their dryness. Moisture gathered along his lashes, distorting his view of the crowd as he started to push through them. "Move!" he cried, sniffling and tripping over his feet until he broke through the front of the group._

" _Someone call the police, I don't think – no, they're not moving! Who is it?"_

" _Oh my god... I can't tell they're head is covered. Did you see it?"_

" _No, I heard it!"_

" _Call the police!"_

 _The crowd thinned as the lamp's light shone brighter over the body and Wallace started breathing erratically, pinching his eyes shut to force tears from his eyes._

" _Someone just jumped off the building! They're dead! Oh my god, their hood is it up, I can't tell!"_

" _Are you calling the police?"_

" _Yes!"_

 _Wallace sank to his knees once he was free of the crowd, falling beside the crumpled body lying feet from the building's edge. His reached out, purposefully trembling as he reached for the body, his eyes inching toward their head. Between blood crawling across stone and heavy shadows, Wallace saw a mixture of shock and fear, the last expression they'd ever make._

" _N-No," he shuddered. Wallace brushed away a strand of hair as he leaned forward and brought his head to their shoulder, sobbing._

* * *

" _ **Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!** "_

A loud smack woke Wallace as an angry mechanical voice filled Wallace's room as it chanted in time with the blare of an alarm. Wallace fell out of bed, heavy eyes catching something red and white rolling across the floor when it bumped into Wink's pool and rattled the snoozing water-type.

Rubbing his shoulder, Wallace watched Wink leap out of his pool and capture the red and white ball in his jaws, giving it several test bites until he spit it out and sent it rolling toward Garret's bed.

A bare foot slipped out from Garret's covers and stepped on the ball, a pair of eyes and a plastic display screen facing Wallace that told him it was seven o'clock. "Looks like my voltorb alarm clock works," Garret said as he grabbed his new gadget and wiped it clean of Wink's spit.

"A little too well," Wallace sighed, crawling back into bed.

"You said today was the day you went back to class."

Half-mounting his bed, Wallace craned his neck back to Garret who fiddled with the clock to turn off the alarm. "Did I?" he asked. Casting his eyes across his room Wallace saw Wink's tail cutting through the water, he'd want breakfast. Spinarak made an appearance on top of the television along with Garret's magnemite, and along the window sill elgyem rubbed his large eyes. "I guess I did." Wallace let out a soft sob as he pressed his face into his pillow.

Following a shower, Wallace felt moderately capable of handling a day juggling the thoughts of Willow the Orphan roaming campus and facing his classmates, most of which had seen Andrew's video and heard his name on the news.

In his first class, Professor Sutcliffe wasted no time in verbally accosting him in front of the class, to which he apologized for his truancy, though his compliancy seemed to make the elder professor even angrier. Following that, Professor Till had no qualms when he laid into him regarding all the assignments he'd missed in the last month and how his grade had plummeted. By the end of the school day Neo had bombarded him with paperwork for tutoring services and he was thankful to enter his battle lab, glad Professor Oakburn had taken the day off and Professor Summers' greeted him with a smile.

"What is he wearing?" Neo asked as he miniaturized a Poké Ball and slipped it away into his pocket. He pulled at the shoulders of his hoodie and flipped his hood as a stiff burst of wind swept through the stadium. As the weather chilled through October, Neo swapped his dress-shirts for t-shirts and hoodies, opting to keep his baggy bags and house shoes, describe rain and frigid mornings on campus.

Wallace shot Neo a pointed look as he placed Wink on the turf of the stadium arena. Keeping Nurse Joie's advice in mind, Wallace adjusted a pair of booties on Wink's feet to keep his scales protected while on the field. "He's weak to grass," he said.

Neo's face scrunched as he gestured to a new addition to his team, a lazy looking staryu that stood like stone in front of its trainer. "So is Staryu, but you don't see me covering it in bubble wrap," Neo said as he kicked at the arena field. "Besides, it's not real grass, it's plastic turf. He's not going to be able to move right."

Wallace tuned Neo out as he nudged Wink, the totodile waddling with each step and trying to shake the booties off. "You'll get used to them, Wink. Use rage, your target is straight ahead."

Wink made a buccal sound from his throat as he shimmied through the grass toward staryu.

Neo crossed his arms and tossed a glance to his tablet. "Staryu, dodge and use camouflage."

"Yuh!" Staryu straightened and cartwheeled to the side, avoiding Wink who froze on the spot. The gem focal on Staryu glowed for a moment as its arms began to change color, its dusty yellow-brown churned into a green matching the turf and then faded back to its original hue.

"Wink, to your right, rage again," Wallace said.

Wink's eye peeled open as he turned and lunged at Staryu, his jaws shooting open and clamping on Staryu's arm.

"Switch!" Professor Summers said as she strolled past the boys. "Remember, when someone lands a hit you've got to switch to your next pokémon."

Wallace watched Neo roll his eyes as he recalled Staryu and tugged at the collar of his hoodie. Wallace narrowed his eyes to see the small yellow joltik crawling out from Neo's jacket and jumping off, vanishing beneath the turf. "Wink, get away from there," Wallace said.

"Joltik, blind him with flash," Neo said.

Wallace snorted as he watched a glint of light burst from the grass. He shielded his eyes as the light covered their small corner of the arena and faded, but Wink stayed put, oblivious. "Wink can barely see as it is," Wallace said. "I don't think flash matters."

"Shut up, I knew that!" Neo snapped as he twisted a strand of his hair. "Go for a giga drain."

Joltik's small body leaped from the grass and landed on Wink's back. Wink must have noticed the small intruder as he whipped back, jaws snapping behind him, but wasn't able to shake off the dual-type. A ball of light covered Joltik and expanded on Wink's back, covering the water-type as his movements slowed and he slumped in the grass, crawling back to Wallace.

"It's okay, you did fine," he said as he crouched and opened his arms for Wink.

"Don't tell me, you haven't caught that pokémon either," Neo said with the snap of his fingers. Joltik leaped off Wink's back and vanished back into the grass and Neo crouched, waiting for his pokémon to return.

"I don't see why I have to, he listens without a ball," Wallace said as he rubbed Wink's head. From his bag he pulled out a small half-used potion bottle and sprayed Wink's scales.

Neo pressed a hand to his face and dragged it across his eyes. "You're killing me."

"Wouldn't it be nice if I became a famous trainer known for not catching pokémon, but befriending them instead?" Wallace asked. The idea that he'd ever become famous was a wild pipe dream, but wasn't that the point of dreams?

"There are lots of trainers like that that exist, but they're not famous," Neo said. "No one will celebrate them like Gary Oak, you'd be more like Gary Sue. You're missing out on key benefits from actually owning your pokémon. What if I pulled out a ball and caught your elgyem right now?" Neo asked as he brandished a shiny luxury ball from his pocket. "I do like psychic-types."

Wallace looked to elgyem on his shoulder who beeped aggressively and waved his hand at Neo, red digit flashing. "El-el-el-el-el-gy!" the psychic-type trilled.

As a comeback brewed in his mind. Wallace's phone buzzed. Digging into his pocket, his phone going off again, he found a slew of messages from Izumi.

 **Izumi:** _Here I am, trying to enjoy my lunch, when I see your father's face come across my television screen. He should smile more, frowning all the time doesn't suit a man of his age._

 **Izumi _:_** _How old is your dad, anyway?_

 **Izumi** _: I just realized that when I've pretended to be your dad I_ _was_ _agreeing to be a middle-aged man. I'm only 23... :P_

"Cacnea!"

Something rolled into the back of Wallace's leg and he fumbled his phone and it fell with a thud to the ground. He winced at a sharp prick in his calf as he turned to see a round cactus staring up at him. "What?" he asked as he realized the cactus possessed two club-like arms. He watched the walking plant run across the field and stop in front of a pair of legs. His eyes crawled upward to find Willow, the cactus standing in front of her.

"Sorry about that!" From behind Willow came Ignatius, his trapinch scurrying behind him. "That was my bad, Scuttle dodged a needle arm," Ignatius said.

"Yeah, Wallace, are you okay?" Willow asked, arms crossed, her face twisting into a smirk.

Wallace rubbed at his calf again and turned from Willow, he grabbed his phone and looked over Izumi's messages again and slipped the device into his pocket.

"Everything okay?" Neo asked as he crossed the field, his eyes over Wallace's shoulder. "That girl keeps staring at you."

"It's nothing," he said, catching elgyem's wary eyes, even his pokémon looked skeptical at that lie.

"Elgyy." Elgyem flashed the yellow lights on his hands and jabbed the air in Willow's direction, the lights changing to red as he tried to convey a message to Neo. Elgyem began moving his arms in his best imitation of someone directing traffic, is stubby limbs swinging through the air with vigor and flashing lights.

"I don't speak elgyem," Neo said with knitted brows as he looked to his tablet. "I need a software that converts pokémon speak to English..."

"Hey, Wallace, you okay?" Ignatius asked as he jogged behind Wallace and placed a hand on his back.

Wallace flinched away from his touch and practically fell into Neo trying to get away from Ignatius. "I'm fine," he said, shaking off the feeling of a phantom hand he could feel on his back.

"Sorry, just trying to be nice," Ignatius said. "I haven't seen you in a while, just wanted to make sure you're alright. It was an accident," he said, looking toward Willow.

"I'm fine," Wallace said, again, but felt his own eyes drifting to the space behind him, to Willow.

He'd been his most active on Sunday, roaming the halls of the ICO, every hall, every floor, and every lounge, in hopes of finding Willow in one of them. As dangerous as the Orphans could be, Willow seemed like the safest avenue to pursue, better the devil you know, he thought. But he saw no trace of her over the weekend following their confrontation outside the stadium, until she walked into his his lab. The girl was just another face in the crowd, a student he hadn't payed attention to in the class prior to meeting her at the Press Play meeting.

"You know, you keep pushing people away," Ignatius said, his voice low as he leaned across the gap between them.

Wallace fired a side eye back at him. "You don't know me," he said, eyes flicking between Ignatius and Willow. A chill pierced his spine as she tossed a look over her shoulder and smiled at him.

Ignatius took in a long breath, his chest expanding as his jaw clenched. "I'm trying," he said, straining.

"Well, stop," Wallace said, forcing himself to look away from Willow for a moment. "I don't need any more friends."

Ignatius' mouth fell open. "I didn't know you had any friends in the first place," he fired back.

"Well, he does," Neo said, draping an arm across Wallace's shoulders. "Besides, no one likes a try-hard," he added.

Wallace rolled his neck, wanting to shake Neo's arm off, the feeling of physical contact making his skin crawl.

"Hi guys!" Professor Summers said as she emerged behind Ignatius, her round and chubby face shining as she glanced between the boys. "We're not doing three-way battles today, so one of you will have to find another partner," she reminded, bright.

"Of course, Professor Summers, sorry, we were just talking," Ignatius said as he walked off.

"Remember, it's Professor Vivi!" she corrected, practically singing. As she waved to a retreating Ignatius, two curved pincers clicked behind her as the body of a pinsir waddled behind her. Professor Summers ran a hand across pinsir's head and dropped a large plastic toy on the ground. The pinsir wasted no time in grabbing it and squeezing until the plastic groaned between its pincers. "Everything okay?" she asked, her expressive eyes flicking between Wallace and Neo.

"Yes, ma'am," Neo said as he aimed his tablet at pinsir. "Everything okay, Wallace?"

Wallace's mouth opened as he passed looks between Ignatius who headed back toward Willow who hadn't taken her eyes off him. "I'm actually not feeling well," he said, his attention whipping back to Professor Summers. "Can I leave early?"

Professor Summers gasped and covered her mouth, her eyes darkening. "I hope it's nothing serious, of course you can leave! Please, hurry to the clinic. I'd hate to think one of Sienna's students was feeling ill on my watch when I'm only subbing for her!"

Wallace watched Professor Summers shake her head as she continued to mumble her herself, something regarding disappointing her friend as he collected Wink and uttered an apology to Neo. Sparring another glance at Willow, Wallace darted from the field and headed straight for the stands. Rather than take the steps to the balcony, he followed a stone arch into a bricked hallway, a new discovery to him. As he wandered, a medley of smells hit him, all of them unpleasant.

Turning the corner, Wallace found himself in a box of a room filled with low wooden benches and painted lockers along the wall. The sound of water running came from across the room. Steam wafted out from behind a half-wall made of glossy white stones.

A lone beep from his shoulder caused Wallace to turn his attention from the locker room to elgyem who pointed to the wall. Following his arm, Wallace moved toward the left wall and found a door to one of the lockers that looked darker than the rest. Running his hand across it, the metal felt normal, but compared to the other doors, the paint looked darker and flaked under his touch.

"Yo, Wallace!"

Wallace flinched from the locker as someone came out from the showers, Calvin, with a towel on his waist. He made an attempt to wave while he kept an armful of bottles held to his chest. He stopped at one of the closest lockers and opened it, tossing the armful of stuff in. "What are you doing here?" Calvin asked into the locker as he started pulling out clothes.

"I've never been in here before," Wallace said, thought that wasn't technically an answer. "This is the student locker room."

"Well, it's not a bakery, that's for sure," Calvin said as he ran a towel along his face and hair. "You're not a student athlete are you?"

"Is there a difference from being a regular trainer?" he asked, averting his eyes as Calvin stripped his towel off. He made a concerned effort to look over Wink's scales and his claws then paid elgyem's feet some attention.

"The training is more intense, more along the lines of what professionals go through," Calvin said. "Gotta work hard if I'm going to take on the Hoenn League. What about you? Where are you from?"

"Unova," he said. After pressing each of elgyem's colored digits, Wallace went back to studying the locker. He dragged his hand across the darkened locker that, the longer he studied it, he realized dented inward.

"Ooh, you gonna challenge the League when you graduate?" Calvin asked.

"I don't have any plans," Wallace said.

"That sucks, you need a goal," Calvin said. "Without one, what's the point in being here? What's got you glued to the locker?"

Wallace looked over as Calvin came to his side, dressed, smelling like water, soap, and heat. "It's different from the others."

"This is where they found him," Calvin said, kicking one of the wooden benches. "The guy that got burned, they found him under the bench." Calvin pressed his hand to the locker and scratched at the darkened section. "I think this must be left from when they attacked him." Calvin's finger came away dark with flecks of the chipped paint that he rubbed on his shirt and shrugged.

Wallace's hand fell from the locker as the feeling of lightheadedness took over, like Calvin had opened his skull and scooped out his brain. "Why is it still here?" he asked, his eyes falling to the bench that was wide enough for someone to fit under and be unseen from above.

Calvin shrugged again. "I don't work for maintenance, but I don't think it matter. Though, I wouldn't want that locker." Calvin's hearty laughed filled the locker room as he slapped Wallace's back and headed out.

As Calvin's laugh and footfalls faded, Wallace crouched and touched a hand to the bench as he studied the tiles beneath him.

"Elgy?" Elgyem drifted off Wallace's shoulder and stepped onto the bench. He plopped on the bench and dangled his chubby legs over the edge, his yellow lights flashing against the wood.

Wallace set Wink beside elgyem as he looked over the bench. "This is where they hid him," Wallace said, touching a hand to the tile. Unlike the stadium field, the tile looked old and worn, the result of years of foot traffic. "The tile isn't new though, so it wasn't replaced, just cleaned?"

Wallace inched across the floor and covered his hands with the ends of his jacket as he got on his hands and knees and looked under the bench. On the underside of the bench he found gads of gum, marker writing that advertised someone's phone number and the promise of a good time, and carvings of initials. What he wanted to passed off as the gimmicks and boredom of the athletes like Calvin, had him studying one carving in the center of the bench.

Pulling on his hood, Wallace laid on the ground, squirming at a wet patch of water that soaked his back as he touched the ground.

Above him, elgyem flashed his yellow digits brighter and beeped lowly, his other hand coming to his mouth as he shook his head. "El-gy..."

"Yeah, it is gross down here," Wallace said as he scooted under the bench. Turning until he was parallel with the bench, he realized it was the perfect size for someone to fit under. He wondered if someone placed a duffel bag or stacked something beside the bench if someone could be stored there and go unnoticed. As he looked over the underside, Wallace traced carvings of initials in the center of the wood. As his fingers ran over the wood, he wondered how the carvings were made, keys, knives, possibly someone's nails?

"Are we playing hide and seek?"

Wallace sprung up and smacked his head on the underside of the bench. Recoiling back he hit his head on the tile. Howling and rolling out from the bench he gripped his forehead and the back of his head as he staggered to his feet. His vision doubled like in old cartoons as he focused on someone standing in the exit to the locker room, Willow. He grabbed Wink and pulled him to his chest, his first thought of a defense against the girl.

"I have something I wanted you to hear," Willow said as she held her phone and tapped the screen.

Head still ringing from the pain, Wallace tried to focus on the screen. From a distance he saw the signature pieces of a news report, and though nothing ever good came from watching them, he felt hisself drawn to the screen at the image of his townhouse flashed on screen.

"The search for Wallace Pearce, son of Arlan Pearce, continues as police follow leads and information gathered from those closest to Wallace," a red headed man said to the camera. "Police have received numerous leads and confessions, but so far all have led to dead ends. In related news, Sonai Enterprises has made a reemergence to the public eye. Following the rise of Pearce Productions, Sonai Enterprises, previously the leading provider for trainer gear, fell from the spotlight and became known for funding private businesses and organizations. Now, following the dip in Pearce Productions profits and public rating, Sonai may have room to make a comeback, more on that later."

"Although I didn't get to post the video." Willow sighed and shrugged. "I do get one satisfaction out of this, at least Andrew's name isn't the one they're repeating non-stop," she said. "How does it feel to share a name with the most wanted boy in the region?"

"How does it feel to work with psychos?" Wallace fired back, unsure if he could believe Willow's claims of being left in the dark in regards to knowing Chara's reasons for wanting him. At their last encounter in the stadium, Chara had called him Pearce, the grating sound of his voice clear in the back of his mind. Could Willow be that much out of the loop?

Willow pursed her lips, which spread into a wide smile. "It completes me," she said, holding a hand to her chest as she slipped her phone away into her bra.

Wallace's jaw clenched as he took a step toward her, but Willow wagged her finger at him.

"You caught me off guard the other day," she said. "But don't think I'm going to let you get that close to me again, I might just scream assault," she said, dryly. "If you want at me you'll have to do it in an appropriate way, a battle."

"Want at you?" Wallace asked. "I want to get as far away from you as possible, you're standing in the way of the exit." He held out his arm to elgyem who grabbed his hand and climbed his arm, beeping and making mechanical sounds at Willow.

Willow shrugged and curled the corners of her lips. "Aww, I want nothing to do with you too, if we're being honest, but you seem slightly focused on me. Actually, I am wondering how you knew so much about me, who do you work for? I also want to know why you're in here," she said, pinching her nose. "I hear this is where they found Nat," she said, her eyes looking over the floor, walls, and ceiling. "Tragic."

Wallace exhaled, blowing air through his nose at Willow as he watched her survey the locker room. The thought of Nat and Willow's connection to Serena caused an idea to pop into his mind. "Take me to the Roses," he said.

Something changed in Willow's expression as her eyes flicked to his face. "W-What?"

Wallace held back a smile at the shock in Willow's voice and the brief break in her smug demeanor. He moved around past and headed for the hall, back toward the field. "The Roses, I think I'd like them to hear my case," he said. Wallace paused at the corner, biting his lip as he waited, hoping to hear Willow's steps behind him. Silence came from the locker room before he heard her shoes slapping the wet tile before he headed for the stairs.

"You have no case," Willow said, trotting behind him, her hands locked onto the straps of her bag.

Wallace forced himself to face forward, unable to stop a grin from widening on his face, and sure that if Willow saw it she might see through him. "I don't think that's for you to decide," he said. He reached the balcony and looked out across the field. The lab was ongoing and near his old spot he found Neo and Garret battling. "I thought the Roses decided things as a council or something."

"I know what you're doing," Willow said, her voice echoing off the metal seats. "It won't work. You can't scare me into helping you."

Wallace sucked in a deep breath, though he hadn't imagined it would have been that easy. "I just want to make a case about these strange notes I've been getting taped to my door. It's causing me to lose sleep, I think someone is stalking me, maybe it's someone who lives in the same building as me."

"Serena isn't going to take you seriously," Willow said, following him, her steps quickening to keep pace as Wallace headed for the ramp.

"Then why are you following me?" Wallace asked. "I'm sure you've got another class to get to, leave me and my stupid case to me, I don't need you to take me there after all, I remember the way." Wallace made a sharp turn north of the building and followed the path he'd taken when he, Calvin, and Carl returned from the safari.

"I'm not the one leaving you notes!" Willow rasped.

An image of himself standing on a shore popped into Wallace's mind as a fishing rod in his hand bent with the promise of a water-type on the line. Tugging on the rod and reeling as fast as he could, Willow, with her own face, but the body of a magikarp emerged from the water. Wallace grinned as he heard her jogging to keep his brisk pace as he crossed from the Origin Center and rounded one of the classroom buildings, the glass of the Neroli Greenhouse coming in sight. "I said it could be someone in my building, I didn't say it was you," he said, his cheeks hurting from smiling so hard, knowing he had Willow where he wanted her.

"Don't play games with me, Wallace," Willow said as she ran ahead of him and started walking backwards. "I told you to leave this alone, this isn't a game."

Wallace stretched his lips over his teeth to force himself to stop smiling. "You told me to stop asking questions, done," he said. "I'll just have Serena and the others look into this and give me some advice and maybe bring whoever is behind my notes to justice. I wonder what their punishment will be." He wondered if the Roses could act as a pidgeotto and take Willow the magikarp far away.

The muscles in Willow's jaw popped under her skin as she swerved into his path, colliding with him. "It's not me!"

Wallace raised his brows as Willow backed away from him and took in several deep breaths. His eyes glanced to elgyem as he waited for Willow to calm herself. "That was loud, right?"

Elgyem bobbed his head and beeped low at Willow. "Elgy..."

"You're going to make a scene," Wallace said, inching past Willow.

"I can give you the names," Willow said, spinning on her heels. "The other Orphans. I can tell you what I know."

"No thanks," Wallace said, straining to keep his voice light as he ran his hand along the greenhouse siding, passing the etched into squares of glass. Were names good enough? Or was there more she could offer?

"Are you insane or something?" Willow asked, running to his side away. She rounded the corner of the greenhouse and slammed her body against the door as he reached for it. "You get in my face about this, and now you act like you don't care. Seriously, is something wrong with you?"

Wallace tugged at the door handle. "Excuse me," he said, ignoring her questions into his psyche.

Willow's eyes widened, as did her mouth, but the greenhouse door opened and threw her off balance before she could say anything. Willow pinwheeled, staggering to keep her balance as Serena appeared behind the door.

"What is with all this noise?" she asked, her ice blue eyes flicking from Wallace to Willow who regained her balance. "Willow, you're late, I had to make Travis give me my foot massage."

"Foot massage?" Wallace asked, again looking to elgyem whose eyes raised curiously.

Serena smirked as she looked over Willow. "I get weekly foot massages from my underlings, just a perk of running the Roses."

"Cool," Wallace said as he clapped his hands in front of his chest. "Speaking of the Roses, I'd like to make a claim, however that works. I've got a stalker, or maybe more than one."

Serena's plucked brows lifted as he stepped away from the door and waved him inside. "Step into my office," she said, smiling. "Willow, stop messing around and get inside, we've got a client."

Wallace tossed Willow a look over his shoulder as he stepped into the warm greenhouse. Compared to his last visit, in the dead of night, with sunlight beaming through the glass, the lush greens of the Rose's headquarters looked breathtaking. Different plants lapped over each other as they stacked all the way to the ceiling and spilled toward the walkway. Petals of all different colors made bouquets among the green leaves that covered the walls.

Following the stone circles in the ground, Wallace found himself back in Serena's courtyard. He saw Travis sitting on one of the stone slabs with a group of budew dancing in his orbit. "What are you doing here?" Travis asked, his eyes trailing from Wallace's feet to the top of his head.

"Nope," Serena said, hopping across the courtyard. "Less talky, more feet rubby." She plopped onto her throne chair and draped her legs over the armrest, her feet landing inches from Travis' face, her manicured toes wiggling with exictement.

Travis sighed and kept his eyes on Wallace as he took Serena's feet in his hands and started rubbing her soles.

"Tell us what's happening," Serena said as she propped her rose crown on her head.

Wallace bit his tongue to keep from laughing as he watched Travis massage Serena's feet, the upperclassman occasionally sparing glances his way. He heard Willow moving behind him until she dropped her bag on the floor and took a seat on the floor and pat the ground, calling the budew to her.

Wallace crouched and released Wink from his arms, the water-type taking a few cautious steps forward before he charged and startled the group of budew crossing the courtyard.

"You're probably following the Andrew Gates case and know they want his friend, who had the same name as me," Wallace said, finding it hard to lie and keeping eye contact with Serena, her squinted and stern stare making him uncomfortable. Again, he made an effort to focus on Wink, something to occupy his eyes while he spoke. The water-type had his good eye open as he chased one budew in particular who squeaked and whined for safety as it ran. "I found a note left on my door, a threat really. I didn't save it, it freaked me out, but I remember what it said."

Serena made a beckoning motion with her hand. "Let's hear it."

"Serena!" Willow said. "We need physical proof, stalking is a serious offense."

"We can at least hear what the note said," Travis said, shrugging. "Since when do you want to turn away a case? We've taken cases before without physical proof as a jumping off point."

"Whatever," Willow said under her breath as she started playing with a little budew in her lap.

"I got this note, shortly after the homecoming dance," Wallace said as he cleared his throat. "Just in case, let me remind you, about a boy, named Andrew Gates," he said, reiterating the first note he'd received, opting to keep the following two notes a secret as well as the fact the first note came long before homecoming.

Serena's posture changed, her feet slipping out of Travis' grasp as she sat upright. "They're taunting you because your name is Wallace and Wallace Pearce is all over the news," she said, all of her teeth showing as she smiled. "Love it."

"A stalker with a taste for poetry," Travis said as he cracked his knuckles. "Eerie."

"So what now?" Wallace asked, trying to keep from looking at Willow, though he was sure her hazel eyes were attempting to burn holes in the side of his face.

"Well, we don't have any idea who is leaving the notes," Serena said. "Usually we already have a suspect and it makes our job a little easier, but life's no fun if you don't sleuth to get the job done. Do you have any ideas of who could be doing it?"

Wallace shrugged. "It was left on my door," he said, choosing to fudge the truth that the first note came in an email. "So, maybe it's someone in my building. Someone that wouldn't look out of place in my hall, or hanging around outside of my room."

"Willow, you're part of the fresh-meat-squad, you can be our eyes and ears on this," Serena said, grinning. "But until we have some more clues and maybe someone to look at as the culprit there's not much we can do to move forward. But once we have someone I'll contact you and you'll meet before our council and decide if you still want to move forward."

"Do people sometimes not want to move forward with their case?" he asked.

Serena shrugged and her head bobbed from side to side. "Sometimes, when we bring two parties together and they actually have a civil conversation they decide to settle, out of court, for lack of a better term. But those that don't, their case is tried before the council and then it's voted on."

Serena slapped the armrests of her throne as she stood and slipped into a pair of heels nearby. "I'm getting ahead of myself, we're still a ways off from that point. But thank you for coming to us, Wallace, we'll do our best to get justice for you, like we do for everyone. Willow, can you show him the way out?" she asked, her voice wavering as she walked along the back of her seat.

Willow stood and nodded to Wallace, but he didn't move, his eyes locked on Serena whose head was down as she held the back of her chair for support. "Serena?" he asked.

Willow turned back, as did Travis, to see Serena practically propping herself again the seat. Her head stayed low as her shoulders jumped and she ran her hands across her eyes.

"Serena, what's wrong?" Travis got to his feet and rushed to her side, but Serena swerved to avoid him.

She sniffled and fanned her eyes, dark lines streaking her cheeks as she lifted her head. "I should have worn water-proof," she said, dabbing the corners of her eyes.

"Serena," Willow said, her voice soft, reminding Wallace of when he heard her speak to her sister.

"I'm fine," Serena said, holding a hand to Willow and avoiding Travis who seemed intent on comforting her. "We'll do our best for you, Wallace. I'm sorry, I just..." Serena's breath shuddered from her lips as her face scrunched up, dark tears staining her cheeks.

In her crown of roses and her dainty hands wiping away new tears as her fell, Wallace couldn't help but realize how beautiful Serena looked, even distraught. He couldn't believe anyone cried like that, the way an actress might cry, expressing raw emotion but keep her features presentable.

"It's Nat," she said, her voice threatening to break. "We get justice for everyone, and I don't care that I wasn't the one who made it so he couldn't battle, but – who, who, who is going to get justice for him?" Serena pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes as she warbled to finish her sentence. She staggered and plopped into her seat and hunched over, elbows on her knees, as she sobbed.

Travis eased onto the armrest and rubbed her back for a second until Serena smacked his hand away.

"Don't touch me and don't sit on my throne!" she choked out, shoving his leg off her chair. "I don't need the public mourning for the life my boyfriend has lost, or your sympathy, Travis," she said, his name leaving her mouth like air from a tire.

"I'm just trying to help," he said. He shrugged and dropped his hands to his sides. "I don't know what you want."

"Just leave me alone," Serena yelled, her voice drawn out in impatience.

Willow hand wrapped Wallace's upper arm as she pulled him away. "Let's go," she said.

"Wink," he said. The water-type gave up on chasing the ragged-looking budew and trotted in a straight line toward Wallace. He scooped Wink into his arms and didn't resist and let her lead him from the courtyard and back outside to the front of Neroli Hall. Students gathered in front of a statue of Professor Sycamore that stood in the shadow of the building and Willow passed them glances as she paced in front of Wallace.

"Don't say a word," she said.

"You did that," he said, defiant. Though he'd lied to people and been less than kind or truthful, he didn't understand how Willow could play a role in the Orphan's game and still stand beside Serena. "You did that to her. Your friends did that to her. She's crying over him, over what the Orphans did, and the fact that she has so much power here, but can't do anything to help the one person she probably cares about the most."

"Don't you think I know that?" she asked. "I feel bad, I do, but – I can't – do – anything!"

"What do they have over you?" Wallace asked. "Leverage, blackmail, something about your sister? Why work for them?"

"I owe them," Willow said, her pace slowing as she pulled at her hands, popping the joints of her fingers. "I told you, every action has a reaction. I can't go against them, I just can't. No one can."

Wallace studied Willow's face, she looked young, like a child. Scared and worried about punishment from a parent for something she'd done wrong. "Do you know who has been leaving me notes?" he asked.

Willow's eyes crossed his for a moment as she started pacing again. "Yes."

"Is it you?" he asked.

"No," Willow said. "I swear, it's not me. Don't ask me who it is. I can't! I know, I said I would tell you their names, but I can't. I can get in trouble just talking to you," she said. "Like the Roses have eyes and ears everywhere, the Orphans do too. You know Chara, James, and myself, but there are two more." Willow stopped and stared at the ground as she moved closer to the Wallace, her head tilted to his chest, Wink squirming between them. "They're here on campus. You know them. You've been around them. You wouldn't suspect them. They're not like me. They work for Chara, they follow him, for whatever reason, but I told you, fear is a big part of it."

"One of them burned Nat," he said to the top of her head. He exchanged glances with the students by the Sycamore statue who looked in their direction and whispered to their friends, he thought they might look like a couple from a distance.

"And one of them is leaving you notes," Willow said. She took several steps back as her eyes raised from the ground to Wallace's shoulder.

Elgyem beeped at her and shook his arm in her face. Willow tried to reach out and touch him, but elgyem swatted at her, a glint of purple light exploding against her palm that made her yelp and recoil back.

"He's not your biggest fan," Wallace said, stepping back as he rubbed elgyem's head and squeezed Wink's foot. "Willow, I don't know why they've got you so scared – I mean, I get why you'd be scared, I am – but you're one of them. Shouldn't you be safe?"

Willow bit her lip and shook her head. "It doesn't work like that, it's not a club, it's not a partnership, it's not a democracy. Power is all that matters," she said. "Chara would kill all of us if it meant getting what he wanted, and he wants you. The only reason he keeps us around is because he can't be in five places at once."

"I know someone," Wallace said, taking a deep breath as the pit of his stomach churned. "He can help you, and your sister, if you need to get away from here. Go someplace they can't find you."

"This is the best job Sienna's ever had," Willow said. "It's just us, we can't support ourselves. The Orphans helped with that, we owe them money, and much more."

"Is Sienna part of this?" Wallace asked.

"No!" Willow said. "Yes, but no, not really." Willow shook her head and pressed her hands to her temples and grunted. "It's complicated. She – she knows, but doesn't know it all – I told you, orders come from above. Sienna knows the _above_ , but not what lies underneath. The _above_ gave us money, things we needed when we lost our family. Opportunities, a new start. I thought it was too good to be true and it was, because the day came when they needed something from me and I've been slowly repaying them ever since."

"Money isn't an issue," Wallace said. "I can help you, both of you!"

"Why would you want to?" she asked, her voice wet and eyes glossy. Willow raised her hand and gestured to the greenhouse door. "You saw Serena, I did that, you said it, I did that! And before this is over I'm probably going to do worse, why would you want to help someone like me?"

"Everyone deserves a second chance," he said, his eyes falling to her feet. "If you tell me what you know, I can help you. Get you and Sienna out of here, away from them, to a place where you're safe. I don't care what the _above_ is, I can help you!"

"That's funny," Willow whined, tears splashing her cheeks. "Wallace, stop trying to win me over. You can't save me," she said as she passed him and pulled open the greenhouse door and vanished inside.

He wanted to follow her, but instead he let the door smack shut. He pressed his fingers into his eyelids and drew several deep breaths when his phone buzzed. Globs of colors swarming his vision, he pulled his phone out to find another message from Izumi blinking across his notification bar.

 **Izumi _:_** _You must be in class, or still ignoring me. Well, just thought I'd update you, the police are adamant like a primeape_ _about_ _find you. I don't know what your father has been telling them, but it only seems to be keeping them busy for a moment. We're going to need to discuss game strategies soon, maybe it's time for another relocation?_ _There's a tr_ _opical_ _region_ _a good distance away. How does the beach sound?_

Wallace gnawed on his lip as he read Izumi's message and immediately started his reply.

 **Wallace:** _Your offer of relocation, I might need it for someone else. How much would it cost to do what you did for me for two other people?_

 **Izumi:** _$$$! I'm talking about a lot of zeros. Why? Got a lover you wanna run away with? Or two lovers?_

"Wallace!"

Tossing his phone into his pocket, Wallace spun to find Eleanor standing in the middle of a yard with her growlithe and a leaf blower strapped to her body. "Hi, Ellie, what are you doing?" he asked, heading her way.

"Still filling in for Don," she said. "Today is taking care of the leaves." Eleanor punched a series of buttons on the extension in her hand that caused a stream of air to explode from the opening and blast her growlithe in the face. Rather than run in fear, the growlithe started trying to bite the air, inching closer to Eleanor with each bite. "Stop it, Stark, you're never gonna get it," she said as she turned the leaf blower to the actual leaves and started blowing them across the yard.

"He didn't go back home did he?" Wallace asked.

"Visiting Nat in the clinic!" Eleanor shouted over the wind. "You should go see him, I heard he was still pretty shaken up after what happened Saturday."

* * *

Walking into the Health and Wellness Center a feeling of dread and unease washed over him. Chara and James had infiltrated the building with ease following Nat's attack and even with added security Willow managed to attack Nat. As he signed the visitor log, Willow's warning echoed through his mind: _They're here on campus. You know them. You've been around them. You wouldn't suspect them._

Wallace dragged a thick line through the T in Peters and dropped the pen. "Is Nurse Joie around?" he asked.

A random pink haired nurse behind the information desk nodded. "Probably in the nurse's station in her unit," she said.

Wallace smiled and followed the familiar lines in the floor toward the intensive care unit. The doors parted and the walls greeted him like an old friend as he walked the halls. Unlike previous visits, the rooms seemed lively, with sounds emitting from the cracks under the doors and shadows moving through the windows, pokémon healing following the National Battle holiday, he thought.

As he approached the nurses's station he saw Nurse Joie behind the glass and waved until one of her fellow nurses directed her attention him.

"Wallace!" she said as she came out into the hall. "Good to see you," she said as she checked her clipboard. "We didn't have a check-up scheduled for today, did we?"

"No, I actually came to see Nat Freelily, if I can," Wallace said, holding Wink aloft, the water-type growing antsy in the presence of the nurse as he did every time Wallace brought him. "I know he's on a restricted security list, Johnny told me."

"Yes, Johnny likes to tell a lot," Nurse Joie said. "It looks like aside from his girlfriend you're the only non-family member Nat said he wanted to have rights to visit him. Follow me."

Wallace swallowed that fact as he followed the head nurse through the burn unit hall. Rather than stopping at the door on the left side of the wing, Nurse Joie led him through the double doors at the end and they hung close to the wall and left through another set of double doors and entering a hall identical to the first.

"I usually have to give visitors a speech about security buffers and not getting lost in here, but I think you know the halls almost as well as I do." Nurse Joie stopped at a door on the right and rapped on the glass. She waited a breath before she opened the door and stepped aside. "No rush, Wallace, stay as long as you like."

The room was bigger than the last, with lots of space on either side of a large bed against the adjacent wall. Moving closer, Wallace kept himself flush to Nat's side. The boy was asleep and his bed adjusted so that he could sit upright, without having to hold himself up. Closing one eye, Wallace studied the half of Nat's face that hadn't been licked by flames. For a moment he allowed himself to believe Nat was okay and that he hadn't played a role in his attack.

Looking away from Nat he saw Cosmo sitting at the foot of the bed, but slumped over, like he'd fallen asleep sitting, but managed not to collapse. In front of him, arranged by size, were a collection of moonstones. Across the room, curled in an armchair was Don, his resting face angled toward the window that illuminated his features by the setting sun.

The sound of blades scraping, like a chef preparing his knives, brought Wallace's attention to the corner of the room behind him where he found a human-sized shadow. He jolted back, almost falling into the bed as something stepped forward, a bisharp, the blades on its arms grinding against each other as it approached him.

"Shit," he breathed as he tumbled back.

"Relax," Nat groaned. "Executioner is my added security."

Wallace turned to see one of Nat's eyes on him, the boy smiled, his face no longer twisted and locked in his tortured pain. "Security, right," he said, looking over his shoulder to the bisharp, whose blades that protruded from its stomach looked particularly menacing in the dim room.

"I was wondering when you might come," Nat said.

Wallace bit into the inside of his cheek to bear Nat's voice. He didn't sound as pained as he used to, now he just sounded weary under the weight of his injuries. "I just left the Roses," he said, as he looked across the room and found a chair.

Nat's hand twitched at his side. "How is she?"

"Sad," he said as he pulled the chair to Nat's beside and took a seat. "She wants justice for you."

Nat sighed, but his lips curved into a smile that creased the skin by his eyes. "That's my girl, always seeking justice." Nat's eye looked over Wallace before he let out a sigh. "Everyone wants to sit on my good side."

Wallace swallowed hard, unsure of how to respond. He had sat on Nat's right side, the burned side, during his last visit when Nurse Joie revealed the details of his attack. "I wish I knew what to say to you." Wallace forced himself to stop staring at the unscarred half of Nat's face. "I want to tell you that everything is going to be alright and that things will get better and the people who hurt you won't get away."

"The things my parents, the nurses, the school's religious officials have told me," Nat said. "Save your breath, there's nothing I want to hear anymore. Just that my brothers stay safe, and that my sister never comes to school here."

"You have a sister?" Wallace asked.

"Her name is Lily," Nat said, smiling again. "She's everything to me. My parents wanted to bring her, but – do you have a little sister or brother?"

"No," Wallace said. "It's just me."

"Oh," Nat said, sounding a little sad. "You wouldn't understand it then, what it feels like to be the big brother. To be responsible for your little siblings and have them look up to you. I was kind of a dick to Bella and Cosmo when we were growing up, but Lily is different. She's sweet, and a little bratty, but it works for her. I didn't want her to see me like this – she's young – and I don't want her to see me like I am, ruined. Maybe I can't bear to see her, knowing I'm only half the brother I used to be to her."

Wallace curled the corners of his lips in as tears burned his eyes. "Nat," he sobbed, dropping his head and letting tears drip to the floor.

"Do you know why the Roses came after me?" Nat asked.

Wallace sniffled and rubbed his nose and eyes into his jacket. Elgyem prodded his cheek and nuzzled against him. "Yeah," he said, pulling elgyem to his chest as he leaned back in the chair. Elgyem buried his head into Wallace's neck, the soft pattern of his pokémon's breathing calming him.

"I wondered if this was karma," Nat said, his head tilted away from Wallace, toward the window. "But then I thought, no, they would have killed me if it was karma. This is worse and exactly what I deserve."

"Don't say that," he said as he held elgyem tighter and bounced his leg, shaking Wink.

Nat sighed, the sound of his breathing filling the room. "Why else would this happen to me? And the girl that came in and tossed me out of bed? It feels like the universe is giving me the middle finger I've been expecting for a long time."

"It's not for you," Wallace said.

Nat's bed creaked as he rolled his head to Wallace, the bandages over the left side of his face catching the sunlight. "What?"

"That middle finger you think the universe had been waiting to give you, it's not for you, it's for me," Wallace said. "They attacked you because of me."

"They told me to thank you," Nat said. "Those people, the Orphans, whatever... They said ' _you can thank Wallace for this_ '."

Wallace sat forward, the wood chair groaning under him. "Do you remember what they looked like?" he asked. "Anything at all?"

Nat did his best to shake his head. "No. It was just those two guys, the one the university has been looking for, the pale one with dark hair. The one that attacked me, he was different though, I can't explain it."

"It was a boy," Wallace said, like a life ring he clung to his first piece of evidence, three boys, Willow, and an unknown final Orphan.

"Why do they want you?" he asked.

"I wish I knew," Wallace said. "I've been trying to figure that out myself and I'm not really any closer to the truth... I should go, I just wanted to see Don and check on you." Wallace kept elgyem pressed to his chest while he grabbed Wink, wondering how he was going to open a door with his hands full.

"Cosmo told me what happened during the dance," Nat said.

Wallace froze mid-way to the door and turned on his heel to find Nat... smiling. "Oh yeah?" he asked as elgyem took the hint and hung onto his neck as Wallace opened the door.

"Yep, and Don filled me in on the rest of the drama," Nat said, turning his attention back to the ceiling. "It's not something I understand, and it kind of grosses me out."

Wallace flared his nostrils. "Well, I didn't ask for your opinion on it, sorry gay drama grosses you out," he said, as his thoughts snapped back to him, was he gay? "If you don't like it then I won't come by again. Or you can avoid me whenever you're released. There are maybe a few other relationships you can judge if you like." Wallace wondered if it was clinic etiquette to yell at patients.

"Relax," Nat said, straining not to laugh. "I don't agree with it, but you're right, you didn't ask my opinion, and my opinion doesn't matter. I've learned my lesson on that. If you know about the Roses, then you know about me."

"Yeah," Wallace said, his eyes flicking to Don, a slew of questions flooding his mind about how Nat's relationship with Don.

"Back then, I don't know why I thought my opinion, or views, thoughts, whatever, about another person's sexuality matter." Nat said, his voice growing softer to the point Wallace had to strain to hear him. "But, if you're what makes him happy, then so be it. I can't stop it and my opinion doesn't matter and shouldn't affect you."

"It's not like we're dating," Wallace said, followed by a nervous chortle. "It was just a kiss."

"Are you the type of person to buy Moomoo Milk without giving attention and care to the miltank it came from?" Nat asked.

"What does that even mean?" Wallace asked, his eyes flicking to Don, still snoozing in the chair. "Is Don the miltank here?"

Nat sighed and trailed his good arm along the collection of tubes leading from his arm to a horde of machines. "I don't know what I'm saying, they've got me so hopped up in here," Nat said. "Take care of yourself, Wallace."

"You too," he said as he pulled the door shut.

* * *

End of Chapter Twenty-Nine

* * *

 _ **AN:** Chugging along, just five chapters left until the first half of the story wraps up._

 **Question of the Chapter #28:** Do you think there's any hope for Wallace at living a normal life or a trainer he used to dream about?


	30. The Lying Game

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.  
 **Warning:** This chapter contains suggestive/adult content that may not be appropriate for everyone including implied sexual assault and attempted suicide.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty – The Lying Game**

 _We don't actually fear death  
_ _We fear that no one will notice our absence  
_ _That we will disappear without a trace – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Leaving the clinic and the Freelily boys, Wallace wandered the main campus walkway and found students in the middle of setting up larger than life decorations for Halloween. A frumpy-looking pumpkaboo in the middle of inflating up caught his eye as he passed the school's library along with rows of blow-up trevenants that lined the path Following a straight path toward the fountains, Wallace paused by one of the school's largest buildings, a plaque near the back of the building called it the Performance Maison.

Passing an open door, Wallace heard voices drifting outside and peered inside to find Kolton in the middle of what looked to be a vacant gymnasium. Wallace made slow work of climbing the steps, keeping close to the railing as the gym opened up in front of him. He paused outside a set of metal doors and peered inside.

Instead of his usual dressy attire, Kolton wore a pair of black pants and an orange shirt with the sleeves rolled. The red head swiped at his shiny forehead as he turned to the gym and clapped his hands.

Wallace jolted, afraid Kolton was somehow aware of his presence, but instead Kolton turned toward the back of the gym.

"Let's go again," he said.

Elgyem drifted from Wallace's shoulder and hovered inside the doorway, his ovoid head poking inside and turning left and right. Elgyem turned and flashed his green lights at Wallace and then pointed inside. Wallace moved to the other side of the steps and craned his neck to see two pokémon in the gym with Kolton, a stantler and pineco.

The stantler, sporting a stretch of fabric tied like a bandana on its leg, rose to its feet and nudged the pineco who hopped away and took a spot in the center of the gym.

"Lady, use energy ball," Kolton said as he walked toward the far wall.

Wallace watched the stantler focus a ball of shimmering green light in front of its mouth before it fired at pineco.

"Kota, rapid spin, we've got to get this combo to work," Kolton said.

Pineco jumped and started spinning as it touched down. Its body rotated at a laggard pace at first, but as the energy ball struck it, pineco's pace picked up, its body becoming a blur as it deflected the energy ball and sent it bouncing off across the gym.

Wallace tried to follow the retreating attack with his eyes, but his eyes fell back to Lady the stantler who fired another energy ball at Kota. The second ball hit pineco who reflected it and sent it spinning toward the ceiling as the first ball bounced back to pineco, who deflected it off in another direction.

Lady fired several energy balls, each that pineco deflected until green orbs whizzed across the gym, smacking walls, the ceiling, and the floor in between ricocheting off pinceo.

"Are you ready for part two?"

Another voice from inside the gym startled Wallace and he almost peered further inside to find the source until Professor Stratton walked past the doorway. The tall professor with her long blue hair walked along the wall with a froslass trailing behind her.

"I'm ready," Kolton said, peeling himself off the far wall.

Professor nodded as she ran a hand down the back of the froslass's head. "Lila, use psychic on the energy balls," she said.

"Laa!" Froslass extended her arms over the gym and then raised them to the ceiling. An outline of wavering light focused on her body that then gripped the bouncing energy balls, freezing them in place.

"Now launch!" Professor Stratton said, growling.

"Kota, rapid spin," Kolton said, fists clenched.

Kota's rotation slowed for a moment, but picked up again as the pineco threw itself to the nearest energy ball. Using its momentum, pineco smacked the energy ball, shattering it, and bounced off, spinning through the air toward the ceiling as it shattered another ball, showering the gym in flecks of green and yellow.

Professor Stratton stomped her foot and snapped her fingers at Kolton. "Keep the audience entertained, Kol! This performance is mediocre without a soundtrack! You'll never win the showcase like this."

"Right," Kolton said and waved his hand toward his stantler. "Lady, use round."

Stantler raised her head toward the ceiling and to Wallace's surprise started to sing, or the closest version to singing that a pokémon could do. A throaty bellow came from stantler that resonated through the gym as pineco shattered more energy balls. Stantler followed pinceo across the gym, her pitch rising each time the smaller pokémon broke another ball and filled the gym with colorful flecks.

Wallace watched as the energy balls vanished until one remained and as pineco launched itself at it, stantler's voice started to waver and fall out of tune. As it neared the ceiling, pineco seemed to lose speed and fell short of hitting the energy ball. Instead, pineco clipped the bottom of a bar that ran across the ceiling and tumbled back toward the ground as stantler's voice gave out and she collapsed.

Wallace watched pineco vanish behind a red light as Kotlon recalled it before it could hit the ground. The red head raced to his stantler and fell beside her on the floor, rubbing her head.

"A disappointing finish," Professor Stratton said, shaking her head. "Work like this won't get you anywhere."

"I'm trying," Kolton said, his head snapping toward the professor. "I just need more practice."

"No, you need perfect practice," Professor Stratton corrected. "Perfect practice makes perfect, don't forget that."

"How could I," Kolton said as his eyes dropped and fell on Wallace.

Wallace wanted to use the railing for a quick escape, but before he could make his feet move Professor Stratton turned on him.

"This is a private rehearsal," she chided as she waved her hand at elgyem, shooing the psychic-type back into Wallace's arms. "A show shouldn't be viewed before it is ready."

"No, I – I wasn't, I just happened to stop by and..." As Wallace struggled to form a good reason for spying, though that he had done anything wrong, Professor Stratton slammed the double metal doors on him and through them he heard the click of a lock.

"El-gy." As elgyem climbed back onto Wallace's shoulder he moved his arm in a circle beside his head.

"Yeah, crazy," Wallace said he climbed down the steps and onto the path. Following the walkway toward the fountains, Wallace found dozens of students sitting on the stone blocks and sitting at the metal tables near the water attraction, trying to savor what could be the last time they got to enjoy the fountains before it got too cold outside.

"Excuse us."

Wink hissed and Wallace turned to find a small group of people standing behind him. He recognized the speaker by her bob hair cut the color of a chocolate bar and her large but unemotional blue-green eyes.

"Mieko, right?" he asked. "I'm Wallace, we met during the grief counseling meeting."

"I remember," Mieko said, her eyes drifting from Wallace to Wink. "Then this must be the egg Denvy gave you," she said as she pressed her hands to her knees and bent over to observe Wink. "Wallace, this is my brother Tama, he's a secretary for the university."

Tama, a taller version of his little sister, with thick unruly dark hair and large blue-green eyes waved, but remained silent as Mieko pointed to him before she gestured to a short girl to her right.

"This is Atusko Fujioka, she'll be attending the university next year," Meiko said. "We're on a tour."

"Fujioka," Wallace said, the name rolling off his tongue with an air of familiarity. Atsuko's white hair, held back in a ponytail by a ribbon, held a ghosty look to it under the moonlight. Her tanned skin creased as she smiled and a bright pair of blue eyes seemed to twinkle as she greeted Wallace.

"Hi!" she said, a hand popping out of the sleeve of her sweater and flashing a peace sign at Wallace. "Call me Suko!" Atsuko turned and Wallace watched something wriggle under the back of her sweater as a brown and tan head popped out of her neckline and cried at him. "This is my eevee, Flare, she says hiiiiii!"

Wallace watched Atsuko rub her head against Flare and match the eevee's cry with a mewl of her own before he looked to Tama who scratched the side of his head and Mieko who looked thoroughly done with her tour.

"We should get going," Mieko said. "We have a lot of ground to cover before it gets dark," she said. "I'm sure your parents don't want you out here too late."

Atsuko stopped in the middle of playfully nibbling on her eevee's paws as something Mieko said seemed to strike her. "Oh!" she exclaimed as she blew air through her lips and fanned the air in front of her. "Don't worry about that, I'm practically an orphan!"

Mieko's brows raised at the girl. "Oh? I saw on your form someone signed under parent or guardian."

"My uncle," Atsuko said, shrugging. "I have no clue where my mom is or who my dad is."

"Guess you kind of are an orphan," Mieko said. "Well, we still shouldn't take too long on your tour, let's keep moving. Nice to see you again, Wallace."

Wallace nodded and stepped to the side as the trio passed. Atsuko turned back and kissed her fingers before she threw up another peace sign.

* * *

Leaving the fountains, Wallace made a beeline for the ICO, desperate to get to his room and lay down as the day's events had worn him out. He paused in the lobby, interrupting a card game, to talk with Carl and Calvin before he headed upstairs.

Turning the corner toward his room, Wink felt like a hundred pound weight in his arm that got heavier with each step. He longed to plop the water-type back into his pool and plop himself into bed, but that hope vanished at the sight of Arlette standing outside his room.

He paused at the corner in the hall and watched her knock on his door. He could see her lips moving, and figured she must have thought he was inside, ignoring her, which was a fair assumption. He wanted to turn on his heel and head back downstairs, maybe hide in Neo's room, but curiosity of how long Arlette would wait outside kept him rooted in place.

She continued knocking and added in what looked like impatient foot tapping before she turned to leave, but froze as her eyes fell on him.

Wallace flinched, and wondered how it would look if he turned and ran, but the longer they held eye contact he knew that would be impossible without her chasing him. Cursing himself for not running when he had the chance, Wallace trudged across the hall and fished his keys out. "What?" he asked as he unlocked the door and flipped on the lights, Garret was out. "Garret's not here, you should leave."

"Yeah, I was just with him," Arlette said, stepping into the doorway. "I was hoping I could talk to you."

"You're not coming in," he said, not bothering to block her path as he let Wink slide out of his arms and into his pool. The water-type slid into the pool with a splash as he circled his plastic ocean. Wallace released spinarak onto his bed along with elgyem and shook out his arms when his door slammed shut. He whipped around to find Arlette standing inside with him, hands balled at her sides.

"The police have called me," she said, uncurling her fists and placing them flat on the door. "They want to question me, again. I'm going to go and I'm going to tell them everything I know."

Wallace watched her body tremble with each word and heard each dip her voice made. Her eye darted in front of her, not focused on any one object, but shifting from left to right as if she had read the lines of a character stronger and confident than herself.

"But I don't have to go, I don't have to tell them anything, not if you tell me the truth first," she said, her eyes flicking across the floor and crawling up Wallace's body until they found his face again.

"Nothing you say matters, so go ahead and talk to the police," Wallace said as he turned from her and rolled his neck. A throbbing kink pulsed at the base of his neck as he seethed with rage for her consistent efforts. "Tell them everything you came up with in that little head of yours. Do you get that? That nothing you say matters? I'll tell you why, because you're weak," he said as he cupped his neck and massaged his shoulder and neck. "You stress me out..."

Wallace made a short loop across his room, unable to stand for even a second or let his eyes linger on Arlette as his anger boiled. Setting aside her constant accusations, her mere presence in his room let him ablaze.

As he passed Wink's pool he paused and held his wrists out, as Willow had done for him. "Here, I'll tell you what, arrest me," he said, tapping his feet. "Go on, do it, you brought your hand cuffs, right?" he asked. "Because you're so sure I'm Wallace Pearce, you must have told the police before you came here, right? Arrest me," Wallace clenched his feet, his toes curling inside his shoes as he stepped toward Arlette. His hands curled into fists as he approached her. Arlette backed up, but slammed against the closed door, her eyes squeezing shut as Wallace's body hovered an inch away from hers. "Arrest me."

"Wallace," Arlette let out a small whine as she flinched under his presence, her hand grasping and kneading at the door.

"That's what I thought," he said, backing away. "Because if you had anything concrete, anything besides your stupid fantasies and delusions, you would stop coming here every week. You would have gone to the police already!" Wallace stormed back across his room, made another trip around Wink's pool and back to the door.

"P-Please," Arlette said as she hung onto the doorknob as she shrunk a few inches, her knees bending under her.

"You make me so mad," he fumed as he pounded his fists against the door above her head. "I hate you!" he said, slamming his fists against the door again, and again, and again, each time sending Arlette melting to the floor until she was a ball gathered at his feet.

Listening to Arlette's hiccuping breaths, Wallace crouched and brought his hand under her chin. Fighting through her resistance, Wallace forced her to find his eyes. "You can't bring the police to my door," he said as he let go of her chin and fixed a strand of her hair before he focused on the half of her face that she kept concealed. Using his hand he brushed away the sweeping bangs that covered her other eye.

Beneath the bang he found a green eye that rivaled the blue one he normally saw, as well as a jagged scar down her cheek. "Did someone hurt you?" he asked, daring to trace the scar. Arlette's head trembled in his grasp and her eyes squeezed shut every time his hand came near her. "Did someone break your heart?" he asked as he folded the bang back behind her ear and took a moment to observe her entire face.

"Do you want to know why you can't bring the police to my door, why you'll never get what you want?" Wallace asked. "Because you're not in charge," he whispered, watching the frantic darting movements Arlette's eyes made. "You don't have the authority to make things happen."

His jaw tightened, the fear in her features pushing his frustration to new heights. He stood and took to pacing a line across his room again, muttering under his breath. "I do," he snapped. "I have the authority. I make things happen. I can make you disappear. No one would know who you are, or miss you, I have that power. I can disappear, become anyone I want! You want the police to come arrest me, you think they can touch me? Do you know who I am?" he asked, his head voice rising in the room as he rounded back on Arlette. "No," he laughed. "You have no clue, but, but you have your suspicions, I forgot. Can't forget about Arlette Bellerose and her suspicions, delusions, and –"

A sob made Wallace pause and turn to the door. Arlette hadn't risen from the floor, instead she cried. Slick lines of tears trailed her cheeks as her face scrunched to the point she was practically unrecognizable as tears poured from her eyes and lines and creases distorted her features.

"Why are you always crying?" he asked through gritted teeth. "This is why you're so useless. This is why no one listens to you and why no one likes you. You won't stop crying. Crying. Over. Everything!" Wallace scratched at his head until his scalp throbbed while he paced the room. "You cry over not getting your way, over people being mean to you, because you're the special little girl that loved Andrew Gates! I'm sorry he had sex with you, while he liked another girl, but guess what, no one cares! Stop crying over a dead boy that probably never loved you back!" Wallace threw his hands out and squeezed the air as if there was an invisible ball in his grasp he wanted to pop.

The sound of the door slamming caused Wallace to stop and turn. The door hung open, Arlette gone, the sound of footfalls down the hall the only trace of her.

Wallace sighed and began pulling at his fingers and rubbing the bones in his palms together as he paced to his bed and grabbed his bag. "Whatever," he said as he turned it over and dumped the contents out, causing elgyem and spinarak to scatter. He rummaged through the stuff on his bed before he found the crumbled pages of Arlette's diary. "Goodbye, Homecoming, Love at First Sight," he said as he read the headings of each entry before he balled the page up and tossed it over his shoulder. "Blah, blah, crybaby, blah" he said as he ripped through three pages at once and showered himself in their halves. He grabbed the last page from his bed and looked over the title, the last page he'd copied and hadn't read.

* * *

 _August 19th – It's Over Isn't It_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I thought things would be better if we got away from Laverre and away from those memories, but I was wrong. We're in Lumiose now, staying in a really nice hotel, but Andrew's been running around so much we've barely had a chance to look at each other, let alone talk about what happened._

 _I don't think I can take this anymore._

 _I think I should leave Lumiose._

 _I don't think I can stay here anymore._

 _It's too painful right now..._

 _Everywhere I go I hear people talking about Andrew's birthday party. I'm invited, but I don't think I can go. It's going to be a big thing, everyone he knows will be there, but who am I? I can barely stand to look at myself. I never told anyone, but Andrew was my first kiss. It happened on the Laverre Nature Trail. It wasn't romantic, we both smelled from walking for so long and we were soaking wet and tired. It was messy and quick, but it was my first and I'll never forget it. First boyfriend, first kiss, first everything. After our first trip there I never went back until he came back to Kalos, but it was nothing like the first time. I don't want this anymore..._

 _Distraughtly Yours, Arlette B._

* * *

Wallace dropped the page and gripped his forehead, the numbing pain of a headache approaching. He pressed his hand in to his skull and shook his head, the feeling of his anger fading to sympathy making his head feeling light. "Why am I like this?" he muttered as he turned and headed for the door. "Arlette?" he asked, the hall was empty.

He pulled his door shut and jogged down the hall and paused by the girl's bathroom, his hand lingering on the door before he remembered the last time she ran from him. She didn't stop to cry, she ran outside. Wallace jogged the length of the hall and stopped at the stairwell door.

"Arlette?" His voice bounced off the stone steps and bricks walls. He stepped to the railing and looked down through the gaps to the bottom floor, but a soft thud above made him look toward a half-flight of steps. "Arlette?"

Climbing the steps and then another, he came to a brick wall with just an old looking metal ladder protruding from the wall. He grabbed a rung and pulled himself up to a hatch in the ceiling. He glanced down back, he was at least his own height, twice, high off the ground as he tried the latch. It was heavy and rusted, but he got to unlock and pushed the hatch open, which was easier than the latch had been.

"Arlette?" he asked. The rooftop of the ICO was flat and covered in small rocks. The only features of the roof were air ducks and large metal boxes with hazard labels and locks on their panels.

Wallace climbed out of the hole and let the hatch fall behind him as he scanned the roof again. "Arlette?" he asked, louder, cupping his mouth. The pebble topped roof spread far ahead of him and then jutted out in the middle and led to another long stretch, making the H shaped design of the dormitory. "Arlette! I'm sorry. I didn't mean it, just, if you're up here can you say something!"

Walking past a large transformer box, taller than him, something caught his attention. At the front of the building, at a spot that would overlook the courtyard, was Arlette, her feet balanced on the ledge. Her already tear stained face contorted more at the sight of him. She choked on her cries and turned away, burying her face into her shoulder. "St-stay away f-r-rom me," she blubbered.

"A-Arlette?" Wallace felt the blood and all warmth fade from his head, leaving him even colder against the brisk winds. He lowered himself and threw his arms out, the way one might approach or back away from a dangerous pokémon. "Arlette, get off the edge," he said, low, as he inched closer and beckoned her with his hand. "Come back inside with me, I'm sorry, okay?"

"I said st-stay away!" Arlette screamed, her voice unable to maintain form and breaking over each word. "I'm not going anywhere with you, this is it."

"No!" Wallace said, afraid she might take the step at any second. "This isn't it, you don't have to do this! Arlette, please, come inside. Just take my hand!" Wallace pleaded as he neared closer, able to see tear drops as they fell from her cheeks. "Arlette!"

"I have no, no friends. I have no, no parents. My family h-hates me," Arlette tipped her head back and choked again. "And thanks to you, nothing left of An-Andrew."

"I shouldn't have said that," Wallace said, lowering himself even further to the point he was crouching. "I was out of line, I'm sorry! I say things I don't mean, I don't know what came over me. Arlette, please, take my hand, come inside, just please don't do this!" Wallace felt the tears bubble in his eyes, but he wiped them away quickly, not wanting his vision of Arlette to be distorted.

"You know, the funny thing is, I wasn't upset or sad or anything when I thought you might be Wallace Pearce," Arlette said, her legs shaking. "I was happy, actually. Thinking you could be a connection to Andrew, someone to help me grieve and I – god, I thought, I thought we could be friends." Arlette laughed, one hard laugh that shook her body before she cupped her mouth and started crying again, muffling herself as her cries turned to screams. "I thought we could help each other help and get past this, but I don't know what to think anymore," she said. "I feel like I'm a bother to everyone and I just want it to be over."

Wallace lunged for her, but Arlette's leg swung out as if she was testing the open air and she shook her head at him. "If you take another st-step, so will I."

"Arlette," he said, but whipped his head to his shoulder. "Elgyem, grab her – no." Wallace clutched his shoulder and clawed at the fabric of his jacket. "Elgyem, no, no, no!" he said, whirling around to the hatch, the realization he'd left elgyem in his room.

"I'm going to take your advice and st-stop crying over a dead boy," Arlette said, raising her arms to her side.

"I'll tell you the truth!" he blurted, his options dwindling before him. "But you have to get off the edge. Do you want to jump or do you want to get what you've wanted this whole time? I'll tell you everything, I promise!"

"You s-said I was st-stupid, but how st-stupid do you think I am?" she asked. "I'm not falling for it. There's no t-truth worth hearing."

Wallace palmed his forehead, his skin clammy and slick with sweat despite the low temperature. He watched her legs tremble, afraid her foot would come off the edge, he felt his pulse quickening, his heart beating to the extreme he saw the veins pounding in his eyes again. "I read your diary!" he shouted, his voice like someone else's. "I know, I know now, how you felt about him. I read it in there, I get it. When you were arrested, your stuff was left behind and I took it to Tempest, she told me you had diaries and I wondered if you wrote anything about Andrew. When you ran out of my room you left your bag and so I copied some of the pages."

Arlette looked back at him and touched her chin to her shoulder. "How much did you r-read?"

"I skimmed for Andrew's name and copied those pages, then I put the diary back in the bag and returned it," he said. "Honestly, that's it. I'm telling the truth."

Arlette shook with laughter that rolled with the wind and seemed to echo across the rooftop. "You should have kept re-reading," she said, steadying herself. "My world didn't always revolve around Andrew."

Wallace nodded as a gust of wind blew across the roof and blew Arlette's hair back He panicked, wondering if a would be strong enough to knock her off the edge and back onto the roof, and if he'd be fast enough to grab her if that happened. "I know about your parents and your money problems," he said.

"It's more than that," she said. "It's the way people tr-treat me. All of the threats, people knocking books out of my h-hands, leaving me notes, breaking my window, wh-whispering behind my back, and I'm not just talking about Azalea. That's almost every girl in our class," she said, her voice breaking, but not out of sadness, but anger. "The boys," Arlette choked on her words and shook her head as she cupped her mouth. "Boys are the worse. They think they know me because I was with Andrew and they whisper things to me, about me. They, they touch me." Arlette dissolved into sobs as her knees bent and she fell, collapsing on the edge.

Wallace thought she was going to fall forward and ran for her, but Arlette shuffled to her feet and backed up along the edge, her feet landing perfectly in the middle of the stone ledge.

"When I told them I wasn't interested, or I didn't like them, they called me names and yelled at me, saying the nastiest things," she said. Arlette cupped her mouth again, squeezing her face as her marble eyes stared back at him. "There are things written about me in bathrooms, in books in the library, on tables in the cafeteria. Arlette only gets, _w-w-wet_ , for dead boys. Arlette's perfect date is a tr-trip to the graveyard. Halloween is coming... Someone got into my room a put a plastic skeleton in my bed with Andrew's name taped to the skull. I didn't want to stay here. I have a family, uncles, aunts, I wanted to live with them, go to a new school, but they wouldn't take me in. I have n-nothing."

"What about Garret?" Wallace asked, his lids heavy with collected tears that began crawling down his cheeks.

"Garret is so s-sweet, but whenever I'm around him, it's like he's trying to outshine every memory of Andrew I have." Arlette clutched a hand over her chest. "I can't help that I still love Andrew."

"I know," Wallace said, his face lined and dripping with tears.

"If you w-woke up tomorrow to discover the s-sun wasn't going to rise, what kind of life would you live without it?" Arlette asked as she shrugged. "I'm tired. I can't st-stumble on in the dark anymore."

Wallace stomach seized as he fell to his knees, breaking apart into choking sobs on the pebbled roof. He wrapped his hands around his stomach and touched his face to the rooftop, stones digging into his face and cheeks. "Arlette," he wheezed. "The whole time, you've been here the whole time." Wallace wiped at his eyes, seeing Arlette turn to him again.

"I'm sorry," he said, snot and tears coating his lips as he spoke. "You're right, you've been right, you're right, you're right... My name is Wallace Pearce and I'm sorry." As he made another attempt to wipe his eyes, Wallace tore his glasses off and threw them across the roof. "Arlette, I'm sorry. I saw him last, I was the last one to see him alive. He's dead. He's been dead the whole time! I'm sorry! We fought and I was scared and I killed him, he fell, down the steps, in my house, I'm sorry... He's dead."

"Wa –" Arlette said, her legs shaking as she struggled to stay balanced.

"I was so scared of anyone finding out." Wallace ran his hands through the pebbles clenching handfuls before he brought his dirt and dust covered hands to his face. "I ran from home because of my father, because I was scared." Wallace rose to his feet, but fell quickly. He buried his hands back into the pebbles as he crawled forward, the tops of Arlette's feet coming into sight. "I didn't know what to do about you, because you've been right about me the whole time. When I found out you were close to Andrew, it only made things worse..."

"I thought the school was safe, a place I could hide and be safe, and be a new person, but I only made this place worse," Wallace sobbed as he touched his forehead to Arlette's shoe. "I'm sorry. My father, he's lying and trying to cover things up, and I couldn't deal, so I stayed here, deflecting, running, lying. I didn't know all this would happen. Someone died because of me. Don's brother was burned because of me. Eleanor was attacked because of me. I'm sorry. I want it all to be over too."

Wallace stiffened at the sound of Arlette's shoes scraping the stone in front of him, but as he lifted his head he found her hands cupping his face and her lips pressed to his forehead. He dissolved in her grasp, more tears spilling from his eyes as sobs wracked his body.

"Thank you," she breathed against his scalp. Arlette pulled his head up until they were staring at each other. She wiped at her eyes before she did the same for him. "It's okay, we can help each other. We can fill the h-holes in our hearts missing Andrew created."

Wallace scrambled up and crouched in front of her and pulled her into a hug, squeezing her as tight as he could. He relaxed once he felt her hands on his back and running through the back of his head. "Will you come back inside with me?"

"Yes, I want to go inside," Arlette said, choking on her words. "I r-really want to go inside. I'm cold," she said, before she laughed.

Wallace's cheek hurt as he smiled and let her go. As he stood, he wiped his hands on his pants and held his hand out for her. "Here, let me help you up," he said.

Arlette cleared her face as she grabbed his hand and stood up. She squeezed his fingers before she let go and let out a breath of relief.

Wallace smiled back and turned away, but a scuffing sound had him whipping back around. His eyes went wide as he saw Arlette's arms flying out at her sides, cutting through the air as she fell back. The expression on her face was one of unfiltered shock and horror that filled the planes of her face as she fell, a victim to gravity.

"Wallace!"

Wallace ran forward and threw himself onto the edge of the roof, his hand shooting out over the edge. He felt the edge of Arlette's fingers graze his palm and his hand clamped shut around her hand, but his palm, warm and moist from his tears slipped off Arlette's hand and she dropped.

Their eyes never drifted as she fell. Wallace stayed rooted in place as he watched her sink into the darkness below, her body illuminated by a lamp at the front of the building. He flinched at the unbearable sound, one he'd never heard before, not even the night in this townhouse.

One of his eyes fluttered shut as Wallace tried to stand, his mind blanking out as he tumbled off to the side and dove into the roof. The dark of the sky filled his vision as the roof vanished beneath him for a moment. The sound of voices gathering, what seemed like around him, forced him back into reality, breaking his descent into unconsciousness.

Wallace shot up, and realized the voices were below. "Arlette," he breathed before he got to his feet and ran for the hatch, tripping and nearly diving back into the pebbles. Wallace dropped down the hatch, his feet slipping on the rungs of the ladder. His palms screamed as he slid down the ladder, his skin burning as he ran down the steps, skipping steps and jumping down others until he reached the bottom.

His stomach bubbled as he found himself at the side of the building, vacant of any other students. A self-hate bloomed in his chest as he started calling her name. "Arlette! Arlette!" he yelled, cupping his mouth. "Arlette, I'm sorry!" he said, drawing out his voice.

As he called for her he backed toward the front of the building where the crowd's voices were coming from. Wallace's breath died in his chest as he rounded the corner of his building. At least a dozen students were huddled under the glow of a light that hung from the building, casting golden light off their shoulders. He watched them exchange glances in between turning their heads toward the ground.

His stomach cramped again and seized as he tried to breathe, air shuddering down his throat and hammering his lungs as he forced himself from the wall. With clumsy and loud steps, Wallace approached the group and used his fingers to hold open his eyes, stretching the skin around his eyes as far open as he could until he felt the night air drying out his eyes.

Just feet from the crowd he started blinking, his eyes watery to compensate for their dryness. Moisture gathered along his lashes, distorting his view of the crowd as he started to push through them. "Move!" he cried, sniffling and tripping over his feet until he broke through the front of the group.

"Someone call the police,I don't think – no, they're not moving!"

"Oh my god, did you see it?"

"No, I heard it!"

"Who is it?"

"Call the police!"

As the crowd thinned near the front, where the lamp's light shone down brightest, Wallace started breathing erratically and pinched his eyes shut to force tears down his cheeks.

"Someone just jumped off the building! They're dead!"

Wallace sank to his knees when he was free of the crowd, falling before the crumpled body lying just feet from the building's edge. His reached out, purposefully trembling as he reached for the body, his eyes crawling toward their face, a mixture of shock and fear, the last expression they'd ever make.

"N-No," he breathed, brushing a strand of hair from their eyes as he leaned forward and touched his head to their shoulder, sobbing. His hand fell onto their side, still warm, and clutched the fabric of their shirt. "No!"

* * *

Time was lost on Wallace as he mourned and wept over Arlette's cooling body. The gathering of students to bear witness to the spreading pool of blood that drenched the knees and lower legs of Wallace's pants had lessened as figures emerged from the shadows, men and women in official garb that broke up the crowd. What he dismissed as the black claws of his unconscious mind coming to drag him back under were the hands of the officers from public safety who grabbed Wallace and pulled him, kicking and screaming, away.

By the time the officers had pulled him up the steps toward the ICO's main doors, other onlookers had appeared: upperclassmen spilled from the doors of Rose-Absolute hall and pointed across the turn-around lot, but didn't dare to step an inch from their curb, while the students the officers had ushered away had gathered in a sobbing mass outside the courtyard.

A pair of officers led him inside, a man and a woman, each who held him by the elbows and dragged him as his feet struggled to work. "Are you hurt anywhere?" the woman asked. "Are you bleeding?"

Dropping his head, Wallace took in the sight of Arlette's blood coating his pants and sticking to his legs as well as the fan of crimson blood that painted the belly of his jacket.

As the officers led him through the lobby Wallace saw the other residents of the dormitory sitting on the furniture, surrounded by other officers. The two guiding him turned him toward the flight of stairs that led to the basement lounge and the urge to flee bloomed in his mind. Bloodied and broken, he wondered how far he could make it, but the cry of sirens outside pacified that desire.

With a brief glance over his shoulder Wallace saw red and blue lights illuminate the windows of the ICO lobby. He wondered briefly, in between panicked thoughts about the presence of so many officers, if it was a sick cosmic joke that red and blue were the school's colors as well.

As the officer's led him to the basement and loaded him with more questions about his condition, Wallace knew there was perhaps certain words he should say or noises he should make or that he should cry harder for Arlette or act more shaken, but his mastery of the lying game colliding head-on with the harsh truth on the rooftop had dulled that impulse in him. Instead, he responded to the officers with bobs of his head between offering single grunts.

As the officers dropped him into one of the oversized armchairs in the lobby, Wallace realized he wasn't alone. Several other students had already been brought downstairs and were in the middle of being questioned by officers. In an armchair across from him he saw Garret's tear stained face a contorted mess as a burly officer note down every one of his blubbering responses into a notepad.

Wallace rocked back and forth as a selfish, cold, expanding feeling filled his chest as his officers talked quietly in front of him. The previous events of the night, and events yet to come, plagued his mind as the realization of what so many officers on campus might cause. Would he be taken away from campus for questioning? Would they take his blood or his fingerprints? Was his DNA on Arlette's body? Numerous scenarios, all ending with his face and the name Wallace Pearce in digital letters, played through his mind as his officers talked.

Garret's officer said something that made the boy blubber again, loud enough that it drew in the attention of the other officers. Wallace stopped rocking as he watched the officers all focus on Garret who was sputtering and trying to wipe his face, only for more tears and snot to coat his cheeks and lips.

"S-She was with m-m-me," he whined, clawing at his eyes. "We, we w-w-ere in her room, talking, k-kissing, b-b-but then she started, started getting upset, s-she s-said she wasn't comfortable. We started talking about h-him, and things got b-bad."

"Who's _him_?" the burly officer asked.

"Andrew G-Gates, we, we, we started talking about h-him and she g-got upset and ran fr-from the, the room," Garret said as he adopted Wallace's rocking.

"Did you follow her?" the officer asked.

Garret rocked and fell against the back of the chair. He bit his lip as he shook his head to the officer. "I waited for her, her to come b-back."

"I see, and is there anyway that you can verify that to us?" he asked.

"What?" Garret asked.

The officer bobbed his head and shook his pencil in the air. "I'm asking, is there someone who saw you in Arlette's room after she left and can back up your claim that you stayed there until... when exactly?"

Wallace watched Garret dissolve into a fit of sobs again as the realization hit. What was an accident, might have looked like a suicide, but easily could have been murder. Wallace bent over in his chair and held a hand to his stomach, his fingers pressing into the blood soaked fabric as he tried to savor the fleeting moments of anonymity he still had.

"Young man, are you okay?"

Wallace flinched under the touch of one of his guiding officers as manic tears sprang back to his eyes, though he didn't shed them for Arlette. His hands slid through his hair, where he realized he'd left his glasses on the rooftop, as he dug his fingers into his scalp.

"Young man?" the female officer asked as she dropped into a crouch beside him.

Wallace shrank in the chair, willing himself to minimize into something the size of a seed to avoid physical contact. As the officers pushed in closer to him, their hands on his knees and back, along with the sounds of Garret's cries and the warbling voices of other students, Wallace was left with nothing to do but cover his ears and scream. He sucked in a lungful and began to scream again until the officers backed away. His mouth sagged open as he made a high-pitched scream until he ran out of air.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty

* * *

 ** _AN:_** Character debut of **Atsuko Fujioka** by **Reduced20**

 **Question of the Chapter #29:** Do you think Arlette's death will affect Wallace's life at Radix or will he be able to escape the consequences again?


	31. Father

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty One – Father**

 _You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it  
_ _You only know what it is not to hope – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace walked along a balcony railing on top Rose-Absolute Hall, eyes focused on a blue tent in front of the ICO that flapped in the chilly wind that November brought, until a hand slipped around the crook of his arm. Wallace tore his eyes from the tent that covered the entire entrance of the ICO, making it impossible for students to use for the previous two weeks, ushering in heavy foot traffic to the back entrance. Behind him he saw Don's face, knitted in worry, as he pulled on his arm and nodded toward a blanket on the balcony.

"Come sit with us," Don said as he pulled Wallace back across the roof.

Wallace followed without complaint to a fleece blanket Eleanor had spread on across the balcony tile, the only level surface on the dorm's roof. Cosmo waited on his knees, face glued to his telescope, the lens of which he positioned toward the ICO's entrance.

Like a wandering child, Wallace was directed to sit before Don dropped beside him. Eleanor came trotting back over, another large fleece blanket flapping behind her as she wrapped herself, Don, and Wallace up in it. They'd spent several hours on the balcony, waiting, as school officials and visitors gathered on campus to witness the unveiling of the ICO courtyard.

"See anything yet?" Eleanor asked as she pulled the zipper of her hoodie to her chin and ran her hands down her legs. Eleanor dug through one of her hoodie pockets and pulled out a Poké Ball that she opened under the blanket. A small pokémon, purple and furry, darted out with a small black device in its grasp. "Come here, Boots, I'm freezing."

With disinterested eyes, Wallace watched a fuzzy aipom run in circles around their section of the balcony before it charged at Eleanor and jumped at her face. It made quick work up scaling her head and lowering its black device toward her face with the hand on its tail.

Eleanor cleared her through before she spoke into the device. "I said I'm freezing. This was supposed to start an hour ago..."

"Ai-pa, ai-pa," Boots said as it clicked a button on the device that Wallace realized must have been a recorder before it clung to Eleanor's chest.

Wallace wrapped his arms around his stomach, missing Wink's weight in his arms, but too afraid to bring the fragile water-type outside due to the cold. He glanced over as spinarak climbed Don's back and found a resting place on top of the brunette's head.

Don didn't seem to mind as he cooed and rubbed the dual-type who shuffled in a circle before lying down. "Anything exciting happening down there?" Don asked.

"Just a lot of people talking," Cosmo said as he pulled back from the telescope and faced the group. "Oh hey, when'd you get here Wallace?" Cosmo grinned as he folded his legs and sat down, watching the scene around him. Elgyem hovered behind Cosmo's gothorita who seemed to playfully ignore the pursuing psychic-type.

"He got here when you were setting up your telescope," Eleanor said. "You snapped at him when he bumped into it, remember?"

"Not really," Cosmo admitted as he scooped his gothorita and elgyem up in his arms, cradling them both like babies.

Don gasped and garnered everyone's attention as he pointed to the sky. A winged pokémon soared above the dormitory, flying past the sun behind clouds and casting a dull shadow on them as a pair of pale green wings flapped overhead. The pokémon circled between Rose-Absolute Hall and the ICO before it began its descent.

"Is that a noivern?" Eleanor asked as she straightened her back to see between the buildings as the pokémon lowered to the ground. "I'd get up and look, but I'm finally getting warm."

Cosmo deposited elgyem and gothorita onto the blanket, the two resumed their game as he turned to his telescope and stuck his tongue out. "Yup, it's a noivern. There's a man on its back."

The pre-winter wind didn't compare to the chill that encased Wallace's spine. He slipped out of Eleanor's blanket and moved to the balcony railing, against Don's request that he sit down. He watched a well-dressed man rub the top of noivern's head before he recalled it into its ball. As the man stepped onto the pathway before the ICO the crowd of reporters and guests flew into a frenzy as they swarmed on him and lit him up with camera flashes.

"I think that's Arlan Pearce," Cosmo mumbled. "I can see the Dean of Students down there, I think they're about to start. Were they waiting on Mr. Pearce to show up?"

"I'll be back," Wallace said, the use of his voice after staying silent for days on end irritating his throat. "Elgy," he said.

"Where are you going? Stay," Don said, patting the balcony tile beside him. "Elgy doesn't want to leave."

Wallace looked to elgyem, joined at the hands with gothorita as they walked in circles around the balcony. Elgyem's green lights flashed brightly at gothorita who batted her large eyes at him.

"I think they like each other," Cosmo said, glancing to the two psychic-types.

Wallace looked toward spinarak who seemed to be weaving lines through Don's hair and decided to go alone until Eleanor hoisted her aipom at him.

"Take Boots, he loves getting gossip," she said.

"Aipa!" Boots' tail swung below him, his recording device catching the light.

"It's okay, I'll go alone," Wallace said as he headed for the hatch that led back inside. The last thing he wanted was someone recording a conversation between him and his father.

"Hurry back," Don said, his voice a plea.

Wallace nodded as he climbed a ladder to the third floor of the dorm hall and made quick, but careful work of climbing the steps to the first floor. He pushed through the front doors and was immediately absorbed into a crowd of students.

From across the lot he could hear camera's clicking in overdrive to capture Arlan's presence on campus as several large flying-type pokémon converged on the blue tent. As he moved closer to the scene Wallace saw them pecking and pulling at white strings that kept the tent secured to poles in the ground before they undid the knots and flew off with the tent.

The ICO's courtyard looked the same, a stone path with benches and a surplus of landscaping that led to the front steps of the Civet Complex. What had changed, was that it all looked new, in a similar manner to how the university had redone the stadium following Nat's attack. Arlette's death had given the school an excuse to lay new stone, polish the wood of the benches, and plant new flowers, roses, in the mulch around the building.

As he parted the crowd he found his father in a black suit standing and smiling beside the Dean of Students, Denvy. Between them Denvy had a hand resting on a gold plaque. Off to the side Wallace noticed an older man and woman along with a young looking girl with pink hair, all holding tissues to their eyes, a solemn-looking braixen stood beside the pink-haired girl.

"On behalf of the university I just wanted to thank Mr. Arlan Pearce again for his generous offer to the Bellerose family to cover the expenses of Arlette's funeral," Denvy said as he gestured to the pink-haired girl and the adults behind her.

Wallace's brows raised as the three of them managed to smile to the crowd, each of their faces looking more tortured than the one they stood beside, the woman of the group nodded in response to Denvy. Recalling that Arlette had lost both her parents, he guessed they had to be her aunt and uncle.

"The university also thanks Mr. Pearce for his donation to help us recreate the Civet Complex Courtyard following the tragedy," Denvy said as he waved his arms around him, gesturing to the newly planted roses and to the gold plaque. "In honor of the Bellerose family we have planted a medley of roses here in the courtyard in memory of Arlette's time with us here and from his day forward this area will be known as the Arlette Bellerose Courtyard."

Wallace watched his father reach for Denvy's hand as a man shuffled past him and crouched to snap their picture in front of the plaque. As the other men and women with cameras took their cue and started snapping photos, his father and Denvy stood frozen in time as they held their pose for what sounded like thousands of camera shutters clicking.

Wallace pulled back from the crowd as a tightening feeling seized his chest. The cold air burned his throat and the roof of his mouth and he longed for nothing more than to crawl back under the blanket with Don and Eleanor. Before he could turn and leave the Bellerose Courtyard, a heavy hand tapped his shoulder before it gripped him and turned him.

"Excuse me, Mr. Pearce has requested to speak with you." A man with skin like sandpaper glared down at him as he pulled a pair of glasses from his eyes.

"Who are you?" Wallace asked, his heart tripping through his chest at the thought he might be recognized. He shrugged off the man's hand and stepped away.

"Mr. Pearce's security, come with me, please," he said as he moved behind Wallace and prodded him forward.

Contemplating making a scene, Wallace pushed through the crowd and searched for an opening, but prior to finding one he saw his father breaking away from Denvy and bobbing his head toward a space beside the ICO steps.

"Thank you, Trevor," Arlan said.

Trevor pressed him against one of the walls and nodded to Arlan before he took his leave and rejoined the crowd. Wallace watched the man blend into the crowd before he faced his father who hadn't seemed to change since their last meeting over two months ago. His face was clean shaven and his dark brown hair was trimmed to perfection, matching the condition of his suit.

"We shouldn't be seen talking in public," Arlan said as he pressed a hand to Wallace's shoulder and moved him further from the crowd.

Wallace jerked away from his hand and swatted at him. "Then why have _Trevor_ bring me over? Who is he? Does he know who I am?"

"You really are dim." Arlan sighed and his eyes fell flat as he studied his son's face. "I had to fire all of my old security, anyone that might remember meeting you."

"Why did you pay for the funeral," Wallace asked. "And the dedication? Why are you here?" Wallace held his hands out, gesturing to Arlan's polished shoes, unable to properly piece together his father presence on campus ground.

"Considering Arlette's connection to Andrew, and the aftermath of the video and everything else that seems to be crumbling around me, I felt it was the best move to make," Arlan said as he pulled at the lapel of his jacket and reached inside.

"Best move?" Wallace asked, his lips sputtering as he shook his head. "Is this some kind of game to you?"

Arlan smiled as he pulled out a plastic bag from his jacket, a pair of thick black rimmed glasses resting inside. Wallace's head rung like a bell at the sight of his glasses in a police evidence bag.

The weeks following Arlette's death had crawled by, with each day offering new details regarding the investigation into her death. Details of Arlette's personal life were played on repeat across every news channel as the police investigated what her final days and hours were like. The official word as of the previous week was that it was a suicide. Following that announcement posters were hung around campus advertising suicide hotline services and support groups.

During the investigation, Garret hardly stopped by their room, and only under the supervision of officers who escorted him to and from their headquarters in Lumiose where he was questioned as he had gone on record as being the last person to see her.

Wallace remained mum about his final minutes with Arlette and managed to keep suspicion off him by feigning illness during his immediate questioning and racing to his room to destroy the shredded diary entries. The only loose end his mind nagged at him about was his glasses. Discarded during his confession to Arlette, he'd left them on the rooftop and after flushing the confetti remains of Arlette's diary, he went to retrieve them, only to find the roof blocked by officers who had begun their investigation.

Without a word, he reached for them, but Arlan pulled them out of reach and he stuffed them back into his jacket. "I see you managed to find a replacement pair," he said.

Wallace touched a hand to the frame of his new pair of glasses, identical to the pair he'd left behind, a favor Izumi managed to pull off on short notice. "Why do you have them?"

Arlan sighed, his breath a thick cloud that hung between them. "I have connections, friends in the right places," he said. "I hope you're happy with yourself. Andrew and now his girlfriend, remind me not to stand on any high ledges around you."

Wallace held a sob in his throat, but couldn't manage to keep his eyes from watering or to stop his shoulders from jumping as he fought back tears.

"By your tears, I'd say I guessed right," Arlan said as he plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it to Wallace. "Since the police have declared it a suicide it looks like you've managed to avoid punishment again, lucky boy."

Wallace snatched it and wiped at his eyes and blew his nose into it, loudly, before he bravely stuffed it back into Arlan's pocket. "I'm leaving," he said as he moved out of the shadow of the ICO to rejoin the crowd. Over his shoulder he saw Arlan charging for him, but he turned and shook his head. "We shouldn't be talking in public," he said, turning his father's words back on him. "We're not related, don't follow me."

Ducking away from men with microphones and women and their flashbulbs, Wallace tried to leave the courtyard and head back to Rose-Absolute Hall, but a voice down the path caught his attention. Turning, Wallace saw Simone waving him down in a group of their classmates.

Wallace spared a glance toward the roof of the dormitory, spotting the lens of Cosmo's telescope, but he headed toward Simone. "Hey."

"You doing anything, we're about to head to the Laverre Nature Trail," Simone said as she gestured over her shoulder to Ben, Persia, Calvin, and Johnny. "You in?"

"Why?" he asked, narrowing his eyes at the group of students. As hard as he might rack his brain he couldn't think of much any of them had in common to Arlette.

"Seems like a good thing to do," Calvin said. "You know, like someone dies, and you visit their favorite restaurant and get their signature meal."

"Or you go to their favorite location to honor them," Persia said. "I didn't know her really, but I saw her around. She hated it here, this seems like a bad place to mourn her. I read in her diary everything that happened outside Laverre, she seemed to like it there."

"I can't believe someone put her diary online," Johnny said as he let a small joltik run across his hands. "It's disrespectful."

"You in or not?" Simone said. "I'm not twisting your arm or anything, just wondering."

"Not," Wallace said, backing away from the group.

"Well, you know where we'll be... if you change your mind," Ben said.

"Let's go, the dock awaits," Simone said, spinning on her heels and commanding the group forward.

Wallace stayed in the middle of the path outside the courtyard as he watched the group follow a different path north and out of sight toward the docks. He backed away to head toward the dorm only to slam into someone crossing behind him.

"Excuse me," a man said.

The man brushed past Wallace faster than Wallace could follow, but he recognized him as Arlette's relative as he retreated across the path. He followed the man with his eyes to see him following after the older woman who was running from the scene, tissue pressed to her face, her sobs growing faint the further away she ran.

"D-Dad!"

Wallace turned to see the pink-haired girl standing at the edge of the path, her wan cheeks as red as a Poké Ball lid as she puffed air. Aside from her hair, her doe-like features pained Wallace as Arlette herself could have been staring back at him with a wide green eye. "H-Hi," he breathed.

The girl bobbed her head as she passed him, looking back to wave her hand and beckon her braixen to follow her.

"I'm – sorry about – your – Arlette," he said, unable to form the right string of words to truly express his guilt in the matter. "Sorry."

The girl stopped and brushed down wild strands of her coral hair. "She was my cousin," she said as she pulled at the sleeves a black dress that looked to be a hand-me-down. "Were, were you her fr-friend?"

The question, along with the girl's tendency to stutter, possibly a family trait, dried Wallace's tongue along with any lie he wanted to tell to comfort her. He wet his lips and lowered his head to avoid her eyes, digging the toe of his shoe into the pavement.

"It's f-fine, you don't have to s-say anything to make me f-feel good," she said, sniffling. "I just thought I'd meet one of her fr-friends here. No one besides her roommate had anything g-good to s-say about her."

"I could have been, her friend, I had the chance," Wallace said. "But I blew it." In a pattern of darting left to right, Wallace's eyes moved up Arlette's cousin's body until he found a plastic case hanging at her side, six Poké Balls resting inside. "Are those?"

The pink-haired girl shook the case and held it them as she ran her hand over the lid. "My cousin's pokémon. I thought I'd take them home and take care of them, or release them when we g-got back. I didn't want to leave them. Sh-she had an egg too, my mom took it," she said, looking over her shoulder to the direction her distraught parents had run off. "I sh-should go," she said.

"Right," he said. "Nice to meet you."

The girl nodded and touched her braixen's arm before she jogged off past Rose-Absolute Hall and followed a side path her father had taken.

Scanning the path and courtyard for anyone else that might beckon him, Wallace moved back to the dorm and swiped his ID to get inside. The warmth of the building and the aroma of coffee from the café comforted Wallace as he made his way back through the dorm halls and back to the roof where he found Cosmo folding down his telescope and shoving it into Don's arms.

"Hold onto it for me," Cosmo said.

Don sagged under the weight of the telescope that was easily as tall as him. "What? You normally never let me handle your equipment," he said.

"Yeah, but that was before I realized how great this balcony is for stargazing, and you live in this building which makes it easier for me instead of carrying it across the lot," Cosmo said as he pried his gothorita apart from elgyem. "Thanks!"

"You're back," Eleanor said, sitting alone in the cocoon blanket. "What was so important you ran over there?"

"I saw you talking to Mr. Pearce," Cosmo said. "Were you looking for an internship?"

Wallace's eyes shifted between Eleanor and Cosmo, each looking at him with an air of curiosity that made him want to lie, but it was Don's face, again, knitted with worry, his forehead creasing as their eyes met, that made him deflect. "Nothing. Are you guys leaving?"

Eleanor sighed and fell over in her cocoon before she inched across the ground like a caterpie. "I don't want to, but I have to go to a meeting to help plan the safari trip for spring semester. Classes may be canceled, but the university is still working overtime to ensure the public image doesn't scare off potential students."

"There's a meteor shower in a few days, I need to prepare my equipment," Cosmo said as he rocked gothorita in his arms. "Astral and I are charting the event for a research paper. If I do well on it I may win special equipment that will allow me to see further into space than I currently can."

"Cosmo wants to find Jirachi," Don said.

"Good luck," Wallace said, stepping aside as Cosmo left with his gothorita and Eleanor untangled herself and left with an armful of blankets and aipom on her back.

"I think spinarak crawled down my back," Don said.

Wallace tossed a glance back to see Don turning away from him and tilting his head down.

Don looked over his shoulder and shrugged. "I get him, but my hands are full," he said.

Wallace fought back a smile as he narrowed his eyes at a bulge in the middle of Don's back. He pressed on the fabric and watched the bulge shift and move lower before it darted left and crawled along Don's side.

Don's breath hitched in his throat as Wallace followed the roaming spinarak as it crawled past Don's side and across his stomach. Don raised the telescope above his head, his face tight as he laughed. Wallace ran his hands up Don's chest, following spinarak who popped out and walked along Don's collar. "Spi! Spi!"

Wallace cupped the dual-type before he recalled him into his ball. "Sorry about that," he said

"It's fine," Don said, trying to quell his laughter as he curled Cosmo's telescope to his chest. "Are you busy later? I was going to visit Nat."

"That sounds – " A buzz from Wallace's pocket cut him off. Offering an apologetic smile to Don he fished his phone out and found Izumi's name on his screen. Flicking his eyes across to the Bellerose Courtyard, finding his father mingling through the crowd, Wallace answered the call. "Sorry, one minute, it's my dad," he said. "Hello?"

"Wally! You've got to run!" Izumi huffed through the phone, out of breath. "There are pictures of you, on the news, they've been running the story since last night. Did you go to that girl's funeral?"

"Yes, but – wait, what? What's happening?" Wallace asked, plugging his other ear as he walked away from Don. "Izumi?"

"At the funeral, someone got a picture of you there and now there's another picture of you, the old you on the news, and they're comparing them to a picture taken of someone running from your house the night Andrew bit the big one," Izumi said, panting. "Coverage of that ceremony for the reopening of the courtyard on your campus is on the news now. They're coming for you, you've got to get away from that school!"

"Everything okay?" Don asked.

Wallace thumbed the _call end_ button and turned to him. "I've got to go," he said as he inched toward the hatch. "Elgy."

"Oh, did you still want to come see Nat with me?" Don asked as he followed elgyem who drifted from the floor and took his place on Wallace's shoulder.. "I think it would be fun."

Wallace tripped over the corner of a roof shingle that jutted out and nearly fell. "I – I can't, I have to go," he said, again, as he retreated to the hatch and flung it open. He secured elgyem as he sat down and swung his legs through the opening.

"Can I call you later?" Don asked, trailing after him, slowed by the telescope.

"Don't call me," Wallace said as he started climbing down, but paused before Don was out of sight.

"Where are you going?" Don asked, his voice more urgent. "Why do I feel like you're running away from me? Did I do something? Wallace?"

"I'm sorry," Wallace said. "I have to get away from the school right now, I can't be here."

Don's arms lowered and the telescope slipped from his grasp, but he dropped and caught it before it touched the ground. "What does that mean? Are you coming back? Wallace?"

"Don! Please!" Wallace snapped, his eyes burning. "Just stop, I – I can't."

"Wait!" Don stomped his foot, the telescope rattling in his arms as his voice boomed across the rooftop.

Forcing himself to leave before he said too much, Wallace ignored Don's outcry climbed the rest of the way down and with his hand holding elgyem still, darted through the halls. The matching beige walls and blue-green tiles would have been easy to navigate at any other time, but with his mind racing about the implications of Izumi's call and the state of his friendship with Don, he might as well have been a test subject trapped in a maze.

After running up and down the same halls in search of stairs, Wallace made to the lobby and burst through the doors back outside. He tripped through the lot and through the fading crowd in the Bellerose Courtyard to the front door of the ICO.

"Excuse us!"

Wallace slapped his ID against the card reader, wishing it would let him inside as he turned to find two men in Lumiose City uniforms standing at the base of the steps. Above one of them a hoothoot fluttered in a circle while the other was trailed by a growlithe that looked well groomed.

"Are you Wallace Pearce?"

He froze. Though the question might have sounded innocent enough to a passing nobody, to Wallace the taller of the officers might as well have hung a neon sign that read GUILTY above his head and announced it with a mouth as big as an exploud.

"We're officers Church and Lore," the shorter of the two said, slapping his partner's arm. "Carrie Gates gave us information that we might find you here. We spoke to a faculty member who pointed us in this direction, we're glad we found you."

Wallace pressed his shoulder to the door, wishing he could seep through. He remained silent as the officers passed looks and comments between themselves, believing silence to be his best answer. The officers turned their attention back to him and spoke, their mouths unreadable as Wallace focused on a pounding at the base of his skull, the rhythmic pressure of blood pumping like feet stomping on stadium stands.

"We were hoping you could help us put together the pieces of the Andrew Gates case," Officer Church said. Or was it Lore? "Our leads are drying up and we think you can really help us. If it's not too much trouble could you come to Lumiose with us?"

He drunkenly stumbled down the steps and into the presence of the officers. He expected their polite tones to vanish with the clink of handcuffs around his wrists and the recitation of his rights, though they never came. The officers walked with him, casually, away from the ICO, toward an open space across from the Origin Center where two large noctowl were waiting.

"Have you flown before?" the shorter of the two asked as he paused beside one of the two noctowl and ran a hand down its back.

Wallace kept his lips glued shut as he watched the officer run his fingers through the thick brown feathers of the dual-type that seemed smaller than the one beside it. He pulled a ball from his waistline and recalled his growlithe.

"We'll take that silence as a no," the taller officer said as he passed Wallace. "Looks like you're riding with me then, hop on," he said, recalling his hoothoot.

While the smaller noctowl looked barely big enough to fit the officer that mounted it, the one waiting for him looked capable of fitting two people comfortably on its back, though that didn't comfort Wallace as he approached it. Noctowl lowered its head and spread its wings as Wallace drew nearer.

The officer already on his noctowl's back moved past him as his noctowl spread its wings. "Don't be shy," he said. "I'll meet you back at the station." With a mighty flap of its wings noctowl was in the air, hovering just feet from the ground as its wings carried it higher.

Wallace pressed a hand to noctowl's back, its body solid under the feathers as he swung a leg over. He felt the officer's hands on his hips, aiding him, as he sat behind noctowl's wings and the officer mounted behind him.

"Hold on as tight as you need to, you won't hurt him," the officer said as noctowl flapped its wings, the wind whipping back up and blinding Wallace.

Wallace pulled elgyem from his shoulder and secured him against his chest as noctowl beat the wind with its wings, lifting them off the ground slowly at first, but they quickly gained altitude and the grounds of the campus shrunk below them as the Azure Bay water spread to their east. The sight of the seemingly endless waters reminded Wallace of Wink, left alone in his pool, but out of fear of saying anything wrong to the officer, Wallace kept his mouth shut as noctowl dove into the wind current and took off.

The fear that came with flying across Kalos on the back of a pokémon hit Wallace hard as they soared away from the university and passed Coumarine City. As noctowl fought against wind currents that opposed them and dipped to avoid other pokémon the fear that he could slip and die occurred to Wallace. Somewhere over the Lumiose Badlands he laid forward on noctowl's back, smashing elgyem, and wrapped his arms under its body. He squeezed his eyes shut as they soared over the desert and tried not to let his body sway too much whenever noctowl turned.

The officer's words were the only bit of relief Wallace had as he told him they were approaching Lumiose. Wallace peered through his lids to find Lumiose Tower in the distance as noctowl dropped in the sky. Though the skyscrapers and familiar landmarks of the city didn't comfort Wallace, the idea of getting on solid ground did.

Noctowl's speed slowed as they neared a large square rooftop marked with an X. Below he saw the other officer waiting for them as noctowl landed.

His arms were stiff around the pokémon's body, but after much coaxing he managed to let go and slide off, the hardness of the rooftop a foreign feeling to him. Elgyem wobbled in the air as he climbed back onto Wallace's shoulder, shaking his head and making an X over his chest with his arms. "Never again," Wallace muttered as he followed the officers toward an elevator.

"It's policy that we do interviews alone, so that means any pokémon you're carrying will need to stay in our on-site day-care while we speak," Officer Short said.

Wallace played with elgyem's feet and nodded as Officer Tall thumbed a button inside the elevator and the box dropped from the roof down twenty floors to the ground level.

"I'll take them over now," Officer Short said, hands out. "You can follow Officer Church to interrogation."

Wallace dropped spinarak's ball into his hand and shrugged his shoulder. Elgyem nodded as he floated away and hovered behind the officer who walked toward a glass room. Inside growlithe were chasing each other and hoothoot were flying in loops around the ceiling. The sight relaxed him, at least if they arrested him his pokémon would be in a comfortable environment.

As he followed the taller officer through bland hallways filled with nondescript doors and posters advertising self-help services, Wallace fished his phone out and shot off a quick text to Izumi to relay his situation and that Wink was alone in his room. He didn't get to see the reply as Officer Church led him into a cold room with only a table and two chairs.

"You can wait in here," he said, holding an arm out.

Wallace nodded, but rather than shuffle in, someone down the hall caught his eye. Her skin and hair were dark, her locks falling above her shoulder in thick waves. She walked the length of the hall in jeans and dark boots with an open flannel shirt and a dark tank top, her eyes focused on a device in her hands.

Ignoring the officer's request for him to step inside, Wallace stayed in the hall as the woman passed him, only sparing him a brief glance with a pair of familiar hazel-green eyes. "Antoinette," he breathed, her appearance knocking the wind out of him.

"Hmm?" Antionette asked. "Do I know you?" she asked, stumbling to a stop as she flicked her eyes between Wallace and the officer.

"Miss, do you have somewhere to be?" Officer Church asked, guiding Wallace into the room. "We're about to begin an interrogation."

Antoinette shook her head, stunned, before she went back to looking at the device in her hands and headed down the hall. Wallace followed her with his eyes until she was out of sight as the door to the room closed.

"You can have a seat," Officer Church said. "I'm just waiting on a detective to arrive."

Wallace pulled his hands into the sleeves of his hoodie as he rounded the table and pulled the chair out. He'd seen in the movies when people touched something police were able to pull fingerprints from it later. He pulled the chair out and slid into it, the cold chill of the metal seeped through the fabric of his clothes instantly. Wallace pressed his elbows to the table and propped his head up while his legs shook in anticipation.

Moments or hours later, a rap came on the door and a woman entered the room. Her appearance recalled their last meeting immediately to Wallace's mind, her tanned skin and white bobbed hair cut, but it also recalled another meeting, one he couldn't put his finger on. "Hi, I'm Detective Minako Fujioka, I'll be sitting in on this interview."

"Fujioka," Wallace said under his breath as the woman and the officer shook hands and spoke amongst themselves. Wallace's mind reeled back to the night Arlette's died, just before their talk he ran into a young girl touring the campus, Atsuko Fujioka. Eyeing the detective up and down it was hard to deny their resemblance.

"Nice to see you again, Wallace," Minako said as she took the seat opposite him and opened a manila folder on the table. She spread the pages inside out in front of her.

"You've met?" Officer Church asked from his spot in the corner.

"Sadly, I made the arrest of Arlette Bellerose under the suspicion of her involvement in the disappearance of Andrew Gates," Minako said. "I met Wallace then, though it wasn't an actual introduction. I also spoke with his father briefly on the matter of his home invasion. I was also at the campus the night Arlette took her life, I was called in by a colleague. It seems you've gone through so much in these past few months."

Wallace regarded the detective with a tight lipped smile, despite her words being aimed at him he didn't feel like answering with actual words.

"Let's just get into then, shall we?" Minako asked, lacing her fingers over her paperwork. "Can you tell us where you've been and why you left Lumiose? Also, why you were at Radix?"

Wallace's breathing broke into an unusual pattern and for a moment he thought he might burst into tears. His eyes fell to the desk, void save for Minako's papers. He realized why they insisted in people surrendering their pokémon during interrogations, for he would have loved for nothing more than for elgyem to teleport him anywhere more comfortable than the interrogation room, the bottom of a volcano for starters.

"Well, maybe I can start?" Minako asked, her voice jumping in tone. "Your father, and Charles Gates, both believed you to be in Unova." Minako ran a nail across the top page in front of her before she ran it down toward the bottom. "We checked your trainer account and found pings for your account all over the region, so nothing odd there. But, just as we were about to reach out to the local authorities we noticed a ping in Camphrier Town, dated for the same time you were supposed to be in Unova."

The door to the room was close, he could reach it in five steps maybe, if he stepped over the table first, but surely the officer and detective would grab him before he reached it. But assuming he did make it outside, fleeing out surely be an admission of guilt. He shifted back in his seat, his eyes crawling up the wall above Minako's head until he found a vent on the ceiling. Possibilities and different outcomes of escaping passed through Wallace's mind while a fire burned through his ribs, the detective's words dissolving his resolve.

"We received a picture from Carrie Gates, Andrew's mother," Officer Church said. "It's an old picture of you, but it worked. We put it on the news and got a couple calls regarding it, the most promising was from the Kalos Champion who claimed you stayed with her for a few days following Andrew's disappearance, again when you were supposed to be in Unova."

"I'm sorry." Relief flooded through Wallace's chest and extinguished the fires, cooling him from the inside out. He found himself wetting his lips and smiling, wanting to laugh even a little. "I've never met the Kalos Champion."

Detective Fujioka passed a look to the officer before she flipped through some of her papers and turned a glossy photograph around for Wallace to see. In the photo was a dark skinned woman, smiling from ear to ear, hazel-green eyes catching the light as the photo was taken.

"Antionette Delarosa, Kalos Champion, are you claiming you've never seen her before. Because I just finished my interview with her and she remembers you vividly. She remembers pulling you from the river in route seven and having you stay with her for a few days," Minako said.

"She just passed us in the hallway," Officer Church said, eyes darting from the picture, to the detective, and to the suspect. "You seemed to know her, you called her name out."

Wallace squeezed his eyes shut and when he reopened them he did so slowly, hoping the picture of Antionette's smiling face would go away. He rubbed his hands together, bending his fingers back and pulling at the skin on his palm, would an injury be enough to give him a pardon from questioning? If so, how severe? He laid his fingers across the edge of the table, though it seemed like the kind of thing people only did on accident, he wondered if he possessed enough willpower to purposefully break a finger.

While running through the idea of bending a finger back, the palms of his hands became wet and warm so he laid them on the laid, the metal around his fingers steaming with his warmth as his fingers crawled toward Antionette's picture, his hands trembling despite being on a flat surface. Wallace focused on his hands again, forgetting his idea to injure himself and only wishing he could stop trembling, but the more he focused the worse his shaking became to the point Minako sat back as the table began to rattle violently.

"Wallace, is there something wrong?" Officer Church asked. "Are you okay?"

Wallace bobbed his head, a single nod that turned into uncontrollable trembling as his mouth gagged open and he sputtered while trying to take in air. The fires that filled his chest had been washed away, but tremors now quaked through his chest with every ragged breath he tried to take in. "I – I can – can't bre – breathe."

"Wallace, calm down," Officer Church said as he came to his side and crouched beside him, resting a hand on his forearm. "We just want to know where you were when Andrew disappeared. In his video he said you were the one to talk to if he vanished and named your father as the reason. Please understand why we need your help. If you know something you can tell us, we can protect you, from whatever you seem to be running from."

Wallace made an O with his mouth as he blew out every ounce of air in his body with all the force of his lungs as he tried to focus on the iris of the officer's eyes. "He's... dead," Wallace said, the words clogging in his throat, and requiring him to shut his eyes and force them out the way a child might sound out a new word.

Minako's posture changed as she leaned onto the table and reached out to Wallace. "Who's dead?" she asked.

"Andrew, he's dead," he said, a little easier the second time, though his throat seemed to be drying up.

"Wallace, how do you know this?" Minako asked, speaking slowly as if she had to prepare the right words beforehand. Her face took on a blank expression as if her mind had to run a foreign program to process what he'd just said to her.

"I – " Wallace's voice cut off as he gagged for air. Wallace's hands squeaked on the table as he sat back in his chair, his eyes rolling back as he took in the sight of the room's single light. His arms lost their weight as they fell to his side and he felt sweat burning down his limbs.

Beads of sweat gathered across his forehead and seemed to draw out all the weight in his body with them, as if it felt like a gust of wind might topple him from his chair.

"What makes you think that he's dead. Who killed him?" Minako asked.

"My father killed him."

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty One

* * *

 ** _AN:_** Reintroduction to Antoinette Delarosa, who was last seen in chapter four.

 **Question of the Chapter #30:** How do you think Wallace's confession will affect the web of lies he and his father have created?


	32. The Night Andrew Died

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty-Two – Andrew**

 _He may have wasted his time and  
_ _Messed up his life for nothing – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

A pounding rhythm of rattling static pulsed through Wallace's head with each step he made down North Boulevard. With every storefront they passed he felt Detective Fujioka's grip readjust on his arm. He wondered if she had insisted on holding him because she thought he might run if she gave him the chance. Though it was more likely he'd collapse in the street first, hoping a Lumiose Taxi would roll over him and he'd be airlifted to a hospital far from the city, but the scenario of running played in the back of his mind as well.

Wallace tossed a look over his shoulder to a team consisting of Officers Church and Lore as well as two women who trailed behind them. In the women's arms they carried grey and white pokémon with bushy tails, mincinno, he'd heard them say. The mincinno, along with a team of growlithe the officers had brought were supposed to search his townhouse, according to a slip of paper the station had received.

At a grassy patch in the paved road their group stopped before the entrance to the South Boulevard over which a banner hung advertising an autumn festival.

"This way," Detective Fujioka said, nodding down an avenue to their right.

Wallace felt his stomach rumbling and a sick unease growing in his chest. Unsure whether to laugh or cry at the cosmic joke of being escorted to his home by police down the same avenue he once fled from police on. He kept his lips pressed together and strained to hold his facial muscles in place as the detective led him down the sidewalk of the avenue that overlooked one of the open sewer areas of the city. Deep blue water churned below them as it passed between metal bars that, from past experience, he knew bled into the region's rivers and streams.

Turning at a stone bridge, they turned into Jaune Plaza and followed the curve, avoiding a trainer in the midst of training. As the gnawing panic gripped him tighter, Wallace tried to focus and take in the beauty and joy of everything around him. Despite having dreaded returning to the city, he would have given anything to stop and sit in the plaza grass and watch a young girl with white-blonde hair and two long braids throw her arms around as she called out a command to a small deino who tripped over its own feet to pursue a wild pokémon across the plaza.

The detective must have sensed his desire to linger and bask in the innocence of trainer life because she gave his arm a gentle tug. "Let's keep moving," she said as she led him across the plaza and into the rush of Hibernal Avenue. Their group swerved to avoid trainers gliding by on roller skates, Wallace stopped in his tracks as a girl with long hair whipping past her face skated by wearing jeans and a hoodie with a plush pokémon backpack on.

"Got problems you're trying to avoid? Wheel away, face them another day!" she shouted through a mega phone as she whirled down the avenue. Above her she held a pole with a banner attached to it, a message about a roller skate sale stitched into the banner with the words made to look like they were being blown from a trumpet.

A pidgeot soared overhead, cawing loudly as if it were trying to replicate the girl's message as it followed her down the avenue.

"I hate the city when it's like this," one of the officers said. "Look over there, there's always something going on."

Wallace turned and followed the officer's line of sight to find a girl parading down the avenue with a colorful flag in her hand. She twirled it effortlessly with one hand while she reached into a pouch at her side and thrust handfuls of rainbow confetti into the air. A small fenniken trotted along beside her, matching its steps with the girl's feet that were jammed into purple espeon slippers.

Following the direction of the crowd they made their way down Hibernal Avenue before they entered a small alley to the side and the sight of his street made Wallace's feet drag across the stone. The familiar street was well kept, brushed free of fallen leaves and clear of any garbage or litter. As he walked, begrudgingly, to the entrance of his townhouse he recalled Andrew's final visit and thought of how he might have felt something similar as he approached.

"Would you like to wait outside," Detective Fujioka offered before her eyes flicked behind him. "I can ask one of the officers to stay with you."

Wallace swallowed down a ball of spit and shook his head as he stared at the front door. "I'll go in."

The detective nodded to Wallace and then to the officers and the women that tagged along before she rapped on the door with her knuckle. Wallace crossed his fingers, praying his father was out of town, that he'd left the campus ceremony and flown somewhere far like Kanto. But to his horror he heard the lock click before the gilded knob turned and his father's face appeared in the crack of the door.

He'd lost track of time while at the police station, the ceremony on campus could have been thirty minutes or three hours ago, but his father was still in his suit, though that didn't help him get a grip on time.

"Arlan Pearce, hello, I'm Detective Fujioka and I'm joined by two officers and investigators from the Lumiose Police Headquarters," the detective said as she dug around into her cloak and whipped out a folded piece of paper. She took her time opening it before she held it out for his father to grab. "We've got a warrant to search your home for any evidence pertaining to the case of Andrew Gates."

Wallace nibbled at the corner of his cheek as his father looked over the paper and nodded. Arlan stepped aside and pulled the door open. Detective Fujioka smiled, clearly proud of herself, as she stepped inside, followed by the officers. Wallace darted inside after the two women who set their mincinno down on the rough stone of the entry.

Although it wasn't his first time back in the townhouse after the fall, the sight of the staircase that rose to the balcony of the second floor still gave him pause and he avoided the floor directly in front of it as he inched along the wall.

The officers crouched beside their growlithe and muttered commands that sent the fire-types around the entry, noses to the ground as they sniffed every tile and corner of the foyer. The two women stepped aside, one of the dropping a duffel bag from her shoulder as their mincinno scurried across the ground and swept the floor with their tails. After counting about a dozen sweeping motions, Wallace watched the mincinno rush back to the women who quickly combed their tails and emptied the contents into plastic bags they sealed and stuffed into the bag they brought.

"Can I get another mincinno? I want to check in there," Officer Church suggested as he pulled two Poké Balls from his waist and tossed them into the center of the room. Hoothoot and machop joined the search party as one of the women rolled a ball across the tile, a chubby-looking mincinno emerging from inside.

Officer Church led the three new pokémon to the adjacent room and Arlan followed after him, silent, while Wallace watched from the foyer as the officer directed his machop to begin lifting furniture. Mincinno darted under the three-seat sofa and dusted fiercely underneath before it ran from the room and back to its trainer to have its tail combed.

While machop and mincinno worked in tandem, lifting and inspecting under furniture, hoothoot flapped its way to the high ceiling and flew along banisters and ledges.

As Officer Church finished his search of the sitting room Wallace saw Officer Lore taking the chubby mincinno into the kitchen while the first two mincinno left the foyer and made a loop around the house. One of the women stayed behind and pulled a large spray bottle from her bag along with a handheld light as she began to spray in a pattern across the foyer.

"W-What does that do?" Wallace asked as he was forced to climb the steps in order to avoid being sprayed. His hands shook on the railing as he tried to support himself.

The women looked up and smiled, tangles of blonde hair framing her face. "It will help me see if there is any blood on the ground. We do searches like this all the time, checking for the same thing many times over in case we miss something or our pokémon do," she said as she made sweeping motions with her arms as she covered the foyer with the spray. She stood and twisted side to side, stretching her back, before she plucked a ball off her waist and tossed it up, catching it, before the lid opened and a small four-legged pokémon stood before her.

"Her! Her!" the pokémon barked as it shook its shaggy blue coat of fur.

The woman crouched and scratched the pokémon's head. "This is Georgia, she's going to help me search, right?"

Wallace watched as Georgia turned back, looking like she might lick her trainer's face, but instead she started biting at her backside before she trotted off and started sniffing the walls.

The woman dropped her head and sighed before she straightened up and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Why," she breathed. "Why do I try?" Standing, she clicked on the light in her hand. An intense purple glow burst from the light as she cast the bar of light over each tile in a meticulous manner.

Wallace swallowed hard as his father appeared in the doorway to the sitting room. His eyes flicked from him to the woman as she neared the base of the steps. He pictured it in his mind, the space where Andrew had fallen and the growing shadow around his head, but as the woman passed over the tile where he guessed Andrew's head had been, she didn't pause and nothing stood out under the purple light as she moved closer to the steps.

Wallace felt tension bleeding from his head as the woman passed the light over the rest of the floor, each time coming up empty before she stood and turned the light off. "Looks good in here," she said. "Sir, would you take me upstairs so I can continue?" she asked over her shoulder.

Arlan nodded and pushed off the wall. Wallace pressed himself to the railing as the woman climbed the steps ahead of his father who stopped a few steps above him. "Wallace, why don't you go to your room? Stay out of their way."

Wallace nodded as he watched the two adults reach the second floor and head off around the upper level before they vanished into one of the hallways.

"Wallace, here you go," Detective Fujioka said, holding two clear ball capsules in her hand. "You're home now, there's no need for us to hold your pokémon anymore. I'll go see if the officers need help."

Wallace watched the detective vanish into the kitchen as he rolled the capsules across his palm. Alone in the foyer, Wallace released a long held breath as he stared at the tiles below him before climbed the rest of the way to the top.

After a beeline to his room Wallace shut himself inside and flipped the lock. He pressed his back to the door and looked over the ball capsules. They were designed to hold the shape and size of a Poké Ball, but didn't look like Poké Balls at all. They were clear and in place of a locking mechanism there was only a thick blue sticker that held the capsule together. Through one he saw spinarak's ball inside and in the other was a swirling blue ball of light that bounced against the capsule walls.

Peeling off the first sticker the lid popped open and spinarak's ball shot out. He caught the ball and tapped the front, releasing spinarak onto his bed. Peeling the second sticker off, Wallace watched the light shoot out and take elgyem's shape before it stabilized into the image of the psychic-type, the light shattering off his body. "Elgy!"

Wallace watched elgyem look around the room, beeping as his bulbous head turned in each direction before his large eyes fell on him and he zoomed over and wrapped his arms around Wallace's neck, humming and beeping in his embrace.

Wallace wrapped his arm around elgyem's body as he watched spinarak dart back and forth across the bed. "Welcome to our other home, I guess," he said.

Elgyem pulled back and gave the room another look before he floated back and touched a hand to his eye that he closed. "Elgy? El-gy!" The psychic-type turn and shook his bottom, his small stub of a tail shaking as he beeped louder and louder.

"I don't understand," Wallace said, watching elgyem lower to the ground and float in circles as he shook his lower body.

"Elgy!" he cried as he shot back to Wallace's eye level and made a point to forcefully close both his hands and gesture to them, attempting to convey a message.

"Eyes closed?" Wallace asked, looking to spinarak who had taken to scaling his wall. "Oh, Wink?"

Elgyem flashed the green digits on his hands as he opened his eyes and seemed to shrug as he looked over the room again. "Elgy?"

"Wink's not here," he said as he dug his phone out and unlocked it. Checking his messages, the last one he'd received was from Izumi, a picture of him squatting in his room before Wink's pool with his thumb up. "Our friend has him, hopefully he'll bring him by, or maybe we can go get him."

The thought of leaving the semi-safety of his bedroom made Wallace wince as a twinge of pain filled his chest. He swallowed it down and padded across his room, kicking his shoes off as he paced the floor, trying not to let his mind roam at what the officers might find in the rest of the house.

The sounds that came through his door were hard to bear. He listened to the officers and the investigators walking past his door, their voices muffled as they communicated their findings, or maybe lack of. He heard his father's voice as well, a sound that made his toes curl up as he expected him to try and enter the room.

While he listened to sounds of the investigation go on around him, Wallace tried to focus on spinarak's efforts at swinging from his ceiling, only to miss one of his web lines and require elgyem to catch him before he hit the ground. In between rescue jobs, elgyem took to exploring his bedroom, opening and closing drawers, rummaging beneath the bed and venturing into his connected bathroom.

The sun had dipped in the sky, casting a sherbet colored glow across the Lumiose sky when a knock on his door startled him from a game of stacking things he found in his room with elgyem. His stomach cramped as he shuffled to his door.

"Come out," Arlan said through the wood.

Wallace waited to hear the sound of his father's retreating footsteps before he undid the lock and opened the door. He caught the top of his father's head going down the steps as he stepped into the hallway. "Wait here," he said to the room as he closed the door.

As he rounded the staircase and climbed to the first floor he saw all the pokémon that had searched the house were gone as the officers, investigators, and the detective gathered by the front door. "Sorry for the inconvenience, but it looks like we're done here, we weren't able to find anything," Detective Fujioka said as she bowed to Arlan and turned to open the door.

Wallace watched with bated breath as they all filed out of the foyer and the door shut behind them. The click of the door closing echoed through the entryway and suddenly, as they vanished, Wallace wanted them to return, for there to be witnesses to whatever conversation he was about to have with his father.

Clutching one arm that was, in turn, holding onto the railing, Wallace watched Arlan turn on his heel and climb the steps. His heart pounded, threatening to burst from his chest and spray the staircase with bone fragments and blood as Arlan passed him.

For a second, based on Arlan's flat expression and posture, Wallace thought he might actually walk upstairs, but a hand grasping at the front of his jacket shattered that. Wallace gasped as his father's fist, clutching a fistful of his jacket, rammed into his throat, gagging him as he was forced backward.

Wallace yelped as the railing dug into his back as his feet left the stairs and he felt himself balance on the rail, his upper body hanging over the empty space above the ground floor. "Da –"

"Why would you bring them here?!" Arlan yelled, his spit dotting Wallace's face. "Why?"

Wallace choked as he tried to breathe past the fist pressed into his throat, his hands clawing at his father's arm while he focused on a bulging vein in his father's forehead. "Pl – eease!" he hissed, feeling his weight shifting against his favor as he tipped further back over the railing.

"Arlan!"

As if the two were somehow connected, as the front door burst open Arlan's hand vanished from Wallace's throat. Wallace raked the air, grasping for dear life at his father's arm before he tipped back over the railing. The fall was shorter than he expected and Wallace hit the cold tile of the foyer seconds after he tipped off the railing. Pain exploded across his chest and shoulder as he hit, a cough of air forced from his lungs.

Head spinning and throbbing as he sucked in air, Wallace heard the click of heels across the tile as someone came to his side and pulled at him, trying to get him to his feet. His face felt hot and his throat raw as he hacked up phlegm, noticing a familiar perfume beside him.

"Arlan, what do you think you're doing!"

Wallace had to blink and rub his eyes several times before he could accurately make out the sight of Carrie standing beside him, struggling to drag him off the floor.

"Get out!" Arlan barked as he stormed down the stairs, something cracking against the floor below him.

Wallace registered a burst of light before the sound of a blade cutting the air filled the foyer. He heard Carrie suck in air as he narrowed his eyes on a small grey and green pokémon standing at the base of the steps. A fraxure, the red tips of his long tusks stabbing the air as it shook its head, stood beside Arlan as he reached the bottom.

"Carrie, get out, this isn't about you," Arlan said.

"Are you going to attack your own son?" Carrie asked, her hands pushing and pulling Wallace until he was behind her.

He watched Carrie reach behind her to a buttoned pouch on the back of her dress. With two fingers she retrieved a ball that she enlarged and tossed ahead of her. The light didn't seem to faze Arlan or fraxure as a granbull stood at least a foot above the dragon-type.

"Slash," Arlan said.

Carrie gasped as she threw an arm out to protect Wallace. "Granbull, quick, use your ice fang!"

Wallace flinched watching granbull make a last minute lunge for fraxure, catching the dragon-type by its tusks as fraxure's glowing claw made a wide slash down granbull's side, blood gushing from the wound. Granbull howled, its jaws loosening on fraxure who landed and bounced back from the fairy-type. A patch of ice shone under the foyer lights as it coated one of fraxure's tusks, though it didn't seem to mind.

Wallace honed in on a dripping sound as he watched blood gather in globs along granbull's neck and fall like droplets from a leaky faucet onto the tile floor. The large blobs struck the white tile and exploded, sending smaller sprayed dots onto adjacent tiles.

"How did you know he was here?" Arlan asked.

"It was on the news," Carrie said. "They showed a live clip of Wallace being escorted from the police station by officers. Charles called me, he said he saw them come here."

"Charles?" Arlan asked, his neck jutting out in surprise. "Why are you involved in this?"

"Someone had to look after him!" Carried said, her voice cracking. "I visited him, I wanted to make sure Wallace knew everything would be okay."

Wallace watched a reply clog in his father's throat, his lips pressing together as his eyes narrowed.

"Fraxure, again!" Arlan said.

Carrie shrieked as fraxure lunged for granbull again, its claw glowing. Granbull barked and charged the dragon-type, its jaws clamping down around fraxure's mid-section before it shook the dragon-type like a toy and flung it up the steps. Fraxure cried as it somehow managed to tumble up the stairs before it slowed to a stop and rolled back down.

Wallace watched his father pull out another ball from his pocket. His eyes widened at the glossy purple and pink lid on the ball, adorned with the letter M.

The crack of the front door slamming open pulled everyone's attention the entrance as Charles stumbled through with a machamp at his side, his eyes wild and frantic. "Why were the police here?" he asked, gasping for air.

"Since we're asking questions, I want to know why you lied to me about seeing Carrie," Arlan said, his eyes lingering on Charles for a breath before he locked Wallace back in his sights. "I asked you!"

Wallace shrunk down behind Carrie as her hand clamped onto his shoulder. "Go to Charles," she said, pushing him.

Wallace stayed crouched, trying to appear as small as possible, as he darted across the foyer toward Charles and machamp. With blood rushing through his body, thundering through his veins, Wallace missed Charles' command until he looked forward and saw machamp's jerking motion before the pokémon's hand clamped Wallace's throat and he was forced against the wall.

The impact forced a cough from Wallace as he kicked his legs frantically as he was hoisted off the ground, his back crashing against the wall hard enough to knock a picture frame down that shattered on the floor. Wallace saw Charles' face splitting into a grin as another of machamp's hands wrapped around his throat and he squeezed, attempting to clench off his throat under his grip.

"Charles!" Carrie shouted as she stood tall and threw her arm forward. "Granbull, stop him!"

Granbull barked as it charged across the floor, its body glowing as it neared machamp, but the fighting-type spun around, one of its other fists balled up before it connected with granbull's jaw in a sickening crunch. Granbull's head snapped back from the impact and it fell limply on the floor as machamp looked it over.

Wallace scratched and tried to pry the vice from his throat as machamp dragged him off the wall and inadvertently slammed him against the floor as it grabbed granbull's legs. Machamp dragged Wallace, his feet kicking haplessly as he tried to get his balance, and a motionless granbull, before it hurled the latter up the stairs. Granbull's body crashed up the staircase, slamming into the railing and tumbling over fraxure.

"Granbull!" Carrie cried as she ran up the steps and fell beside her pokémon.

"Charles, call off machamp!" Arlan said.

Hearing its own name, machamp spun to face Arlan, tugging a gagging Wallace behind it. Wallace's feet slowed until his knees touched the tile and he managed to push up, breaking free from the tightest part of machamp's grip as he hungrily sucked in air.

"Why should I?" Charles yelled, throwing his arms around as he stormed across the foyer and stood beside his pokémon. "What good is he to any of us, alive?"

Carrie tripped on the steps, her legs tangling as she fell into a heap beside granbull and fraxure. "Do you hear yourself? You're talking about killing a child!"

"He killed mine!" Charles roared, his eyes flicking to Wallace.

Wallace tried to speak, but even without machamp's chokehold, something else had his throat closing up.

"What are you saying?" Carrie gasped, her hands gripping weakly at the railing as she pulled herself up.

"Wallace killed Andrew!" Charles yelled up the steps to Carrie before he looked toward Arlan. "And you want me to go on like nothing is wrong? Wallace deserves to pay. I can't believe I'm meant to live on after Andrew's death and not get my revenge somehow."

"Charles, listen to me, okay, please?" Arlan asked, daring a step forward.

Charles shuffled back and shook his head as he laid a hand on machamp's shoulder. Wallace tensed as machamp's grip loosened around his throat, but a hand slammed into his back, knocking the air from his chest. Wallace slammed down onto the floor before he felt machamp lay some of its weight onto his back, one of its arms lying across the back of his neck.

Wallace choked as breathing became a difficult task between the machamp's weight and the pressure of the floor. He watched his father stop moving and raise his hands in surrender.

"Don't, don't tell me what to do," Charles sighed as he ran his hands through his hair and shook his head, as if he was trying to shake Arlan's words from his head. "I'm so _sick_ of suffering at the hands of the Pearce men! Sick! That's why I went to Sonai, the only people I know who can get under your skin!"

"Sonai?" Carrie asked, her voice a whisper from the steps.

"Charles, what are you talking about?" Arlan asked, his hands still held up in front of him. "Sonai? Sonai Enterprises, what – why would you? Charles, what did you do?"

Straining to find a way to breathe under machamp, Wallace twisted his body until he was almost lying at an angle and looking up at Charles. The man's face was red and lined with tears as he made odd and spastic shaking movements with his head.

"I put two and two together," Charles said. "Wallace running away and coming back out of nowhere only to vanish again, the weird news reports, things didn't make sense." Charles tapped the side of his head with two fingers, mimicking a gun. "I was so... lost, in the days following Andrew's death. That night, you called me over, made me stand over my son's dead body and tell me everything was okay, that it was for the best, you used me and my grief to do what you wanted, to say the things you needed the police and the media to hear."

"What?" Carrie asked, her body inching down the steps in a crouched stance. "Arlan, tell me this isn't true."

"It wasn't until I realized the reason Wallace left was because he was getting away with it," Charles said. "I was so mad, I blacked out and before I knew it I was in a meeting with the president for Sonai Enterprises, your old rival company."

"Why would you go to them?" Arlan asked, his voice low like a growl.

"Since they stopped putting out products I'd heard they started funding private organizations and small towns in order to get more trainers out there," Charles said. "They also worked with a small team of trainers who worked like fixers, they handle people's problems, so I hired them to follow Wallace. Sonai was supposed to find him and bring him back to Lumiose, dragging your name through the mud in the process. I'd heard stories about them, they call themselves the Orphan, they're known to be violent. I didn't pray for Wallace's death, but I did think about the karma involved if something happened and it looked like a random accident. Then, and only then, did I think that you and I would be even"

"Charles, you – you're out of your mind," Arlan said, stumbling back and reaching out for the staircase railing as his leg gave out under him.

"Charles, it doesn't matter, let Wallace go!" Carrie pleaded. "Andrew's gone!"

"Because of him!" Charles squeezed his eyes shut and Wallace watched a vein poke out from his neck as he gritted his teeth. "Shut up! Shut up!" he howled as he hunched over, gripping his head, his voice filling the foyer. Charles snapped up and swatted his hand at machamp that jumped back, freeing Wallace.

In the seconds after machamp's weight fell off him, Wallace clawed at the ground and tried to flee, only for Charles' swinging leg to catch him in the ribs and send him curling back onto the ground. Wallace cried out as he clutched his stomach when a hand grabbed the back of his jacket and lifted him off the ground before Charles's arms looped his neck.

"Charles!" Arlan shouted, his voice rising as he stepped forward. "Please, think about what you're doing!"

"I am!" Charles said, shaking Wallace's head in the crook of his arm. "A son for a son, give me one reason why that isn't fair!"

"Play rough!" Carrie cried out.

Granbull elbowed past Carrie and fraxure before it leaped over the railing at Charles.

"Champ, use seismic toss," Charles said, dragging Wallace back.

Wallace pried at Charles's arm, his nails leaving scratch lines along the flesh, but it did nothing to free himself as his vision slurred and spots of darkness bloomed before his eyes. He caught glimpses of the collision, machamp sliding into place before granbull and grabbing the fairy-type from the air. With two hands on the scruff of granbull's neck and the others gripping its hind legs, machamp swung granbull around before it hurled it across the entry.

Arlan ducked to avoid the flying body before granbull slammed against a wall behind him. "Killing Wallace won't make us even!" Arlan said, as he got to his feet.

"Arlan," Charles choked out, tightening his grip on Wallace. "I have to do this, I can't let him go."

"Charles!" Arlan barked, his foot stomping and booming across the entry. "Let him go, I'm begging you!"

Wallace saw the dark figure of his father shrink into something half its original height as he fell to his knees and dropped his head, his hands clawing at the tile. The sight of his father groveling didn't compute and the figures and shapes in the foyer blurred into globs of color and sound as he began to fade out.

"I'm sorry," Charles cried.

"Dammit Charles! Let him go! He's alive, Charles, Andrew is alive!"

* * *

Wallace woke to a heavy fog lingering around his mind, clouding his thoughts, and at the first sight of sunlight when his eyes opened he wondered about his exact location and what day it was. An expanding feeling against his chest brought his attention to elgyem, curled in his arm and partially wedged underneath him against a familiar bedspread, he was home.

He picked discharge from the corners of his eyes as he rolled to his back and found spinarak in the corner by his ceiling, attached to an intricate-looking web. The sight was so normal to what his life had been for nearly three months, Wallace allowed himself to settle back into his bed in an attempt at holding onto that feeling before an odd sensation had him rolling over.

A chair that didn't belong in his room had been positioned beside his bed, it was vacant, though it was a clear sign someone had watched him sleep. His eyes skipping across his room before he found his father propped against the window behind his bed.

"G'morning," Arlan said, his voice slurred and heavy with exhaustion. He pushed off the wall and wobbled as he moved toward Wallace's dresser and grabbed his phone from the top, a charging cable connecting it to the wall. "It's been going off non-stop for two days," he said as he shook the device in his hand, as if testing its weight. "Are these friends, from school?" he asked, his attention shifting to Wallace before he opened his eyes and looked over the phone's screen. "Ellie, Neo, Willow, Belladonna," Arlan said aloud before he placed the phone down.

Wallace narrowed his eyes on his father, unable to think of a single thing to say. Many thoughts and words bloomed in his head, but picking just one felt like an impossible task under his father's moony gaze.

"How are you feeling?" Arlan asked as he touched a hand to the base of his neck. "Your throat, I mean, how does your throat feel? I had someone check on you, they said there might be slight bruising, but you're okay. I had them do a full check-up on you." Arlan's brows knitted together as he walked behind the chair. "There are scars on your back, a lot of them, and the doctor said you're underweight, possibly malnourished. What happened to you while you were away?"

"Why do you care?" Despite feeling fine, Wallace's words came out as if machamp had crushed his voice box in its palm like a ball of paper.

"Because you're my son," Arlan offered, his eyes narrowing in a manner that made him look tired. "And I love you."

Wallace's chin quivered, his lips curling up in disgust as he threw the covers off his legs and tried to stand, but Arlan's hand pressed into his shoulder and forced him back down.

"You've been asleep for two days," Arlan said as he eased into the chair. "Take it slow, okay?"

Wallace shook his shoulder, knocking away his father's hand as he focused on a spot on his floor. "Where are they? Carrie and Charles?"

"Carrie went home," Arlan said before he nodded his head back. "Charles is in your bathroom."

Wallace watched his father's head bob in the direction of his attached bathroom. Despite his warnings to take it slow, Wallace peeled himself from the bed and moved toward the bathroom. His first steps in two days were solid, but halfway across the room the walls shifted and the floor tipped, threatening to throw him off balance before he crashed into the door.

Sweat beads formed on his face as he twisted the knob and fell inside, hanging onto the door frame for support. Stuffed behind the toilet and a cabinet that housed the sink, was Charles, his knees bent to his chest and his hands clasped together in front of his ankles. The position looked uncomfortable, but Charles' eyes appeared glazed over as his mouth hung open, agape.

"Eeeeeenk!"

A high squeal startled Wallace and drew his attention to his bathtub, a small pokémon standing on the edge. Its lower half was composed of chubby tentacles that carried it along the tub while an opaque mantle with glowing yellow spots sat on top of its head.

"Inkay?" Wallace asked before a spastic thrashing in the tub made inkay jump down and run across the floor. Wallace listened to the scoring of nails on the inside of the tub as he approached and found Wink in the bottom of the tub in a few inches of water, his jaws snapping shut. "Wink!"

Wallace fell beside the tub as he slid his hands under Wink in an attempt to lift him out, but the water-type's weight proved to be too much. With laggard movements compared to the water-type that couldn't keep still, Wallace climbed into the tub, his pants soaking up the water as he pulled Wink into his arms.

"I'm so glad you're here," he croaked.

"Toto! Toto! Toto! Toto!" Wink's tail thrashed and he hissed and bopped the side of Wallace's head with his snout.

"How did he get here?" Wallace as he watched his father enter the bathroom and collect inkay in his arms.

Arlan carried inkay the way one might carry a sack of fruit as he stepped before Charles, his eyes locked onto the crouched man. "A friend of yours dropped him off yesterday," Arlan said. "He said he found him in a kiddie pool, I thought the bathtub might do fine. Jet has kept him company."

"Ink!" Inkay squealed as it flapped its arms in Charles' direction.

"Is he okay?" Wallace asked as he moved to sit on the edge of the tub and pulled Wink into his lap.

"Better than he deserves," Arlan said. "Jet has had him under a sort of hypnosis."

"I must have imagined it, or hallucinated, but I could have sworn you told him that Andrew was alive." Wallace looked away from Charles as a glob of drool fell from his lip. "Or was that a lie to get him off me?"

"It was the truth," Arlan said.

The same anger he felt upon seeing his father in his room flooded back into Wallace. He gritted his teeth, but kept stroking Wink to keep from balling his fists and striking something. "Could you please, just once, be honest with me?"

"Honesty is all I want," Arlan said as he moved toward Wallace's sink and sat on the counter.

Wallace watched his father, waiting for him to launch off the counter, expecting for an act sp common and casual to physically pain him to execute. "So then be honest with me," he said.

"He's alive," Arlan said, rubbing inkay's head as he held eye contact with Wallace. "Andrew is alive."

Wallace held his father's stare until he felt his eyes watering and he blinked. He sighed as he looked from Wink, to Charles, to inkay, and back to his father. "That's not possible."

"I know how it might sound, but it is possible, and it's true," Arlan said. "The night Andrew died, you stayed on the steps. I was the one to check on him, you never came down. I checked his pulse. Wallace, he was alive, breathing, unconscious, but alive. He hit his head, but he wasn't injured severely, there was no blood, nothing broken."

"You told me he was dead. You lied to me?" Wallace asked, his eyes narrowing to slits as he on the sight of his father, his casual posture on the cabinet irritating him more than surprising him.

"I had to," Arlan said, softly. "I was awake that night and I heard someone talking outside the house and when I checked the window it was him. I know now he was recording his video at the time, but back then I thought he was on the phone with someone, his father, you, someone else, I didn't know. When I heard him come inside and start talking to you I called the police, thinking I would just have him removed."

"Why?" Wallace asked, forcing his voice to regain its full force. "Why?"

"Wallace, what Andrew knew, it would have ruined everything. I needed time to figure it all out. If you were gone, I had freedom to clean up everything, to fix it all. Once you were gone, I hid Andrew, spoke to the police, and then I talked to Charles. He was right about that. I called him, I showed him Andrew's body, he was still out of it, and I tried to explain how, regardless of how terrible it was, how it helped us. I've been keeping him quiet this entire time, giving the police and detectives false information, sending them across the region after clues."

"No," Wallace said as he shot up, his feet sliding on the bathroom tile as he headed for the door. "No, that's not true, none of that is true. That makes no sense!" Wallace charged from the bathroom and back across his bedroom to find elgyem and spinarak on his bed. Elgyem's hands lit up seeing Wink and spinarak leaped into the air before he scurried up and down Wallace's pillow.

"Wallace, it's true," Arlan said. "I promise."

"It's not!" Wallace dropped Wink onto his bed as he spun back around on his father who had emerged from the bathroom without inkay. "You wanna know why? Why Andrew is dead and why it's impossible that he's alive? Because if he was alive, then nothing's changed. If he's alive he still hates you for stealing from all those people. He'd still want you to burn, to pay for what you did. There'd be no keeping him quiet, especially once he realized you faked his death. So either he's dead or you aren't keeping him quiet, you did something to him and made him not want to talk, or –" Wallace's voice cut out as the alternative came to his mind. He cupped his mouth and held back a sob that shook his entire body. "Or he can't talk. What did you do to him?"

Arlan's head dropped, his hand pinching the bridge of his nose before he ran a hand through his hair, actions of a common man. "If you want to know, I'll tell you, I'll show you," he said.

"No!" Wallace snapped. "There's nothing to show me, because he's dead. He can't be alive, because then – it means this was all for nothing. I left – I ran away, I lied, I broke the law – people were hurt, killed, as a result of, of, of, this!" Wallace waved his hand through the air between him and father, his voice rising in peaks and flatlining.

"What are you talking about?" Arlan asked.

"Charles! The Orphans! Everything he saw was right, they came for me, and not just me, my friends!" Wallace gripped his scalp, pulling on the skin until the skin around his eyes stretched and distorted his sight. "The Orphans killed someone, tried to kill me and others. Eleanor, and Nat, and Ben, and Simone, everyone was in danger because I ran – because Andrew is dead – so no, he can't be alive. Arlette..."

Arlan's head cocked to the side, his mouth curling up. "I'm so sorry about her," he said. "I couldn't believe it when I heard the news."

"All she wanted was the truth," Wallace said, his voice growing weak as he reached a sickening conclusion. "He is not alive, because if he is, then she died for nothing. I pushed her away, told her she didn't mean anything, I pushed her to that rooftop. So stop lying to me, because he cannot be alive!"

"Wallace, I'm tired. Tired of this game, I'll take you to him. I'm not upset anymore, I don't care anymore." Arlan rubbed the top of his head and threw his arms up as he spoke. "This could have worked out for all of us had you never come back to Lumiose, but instead of leaving for Unova, like I said, you hung around and drew attention to yourself. It doesn't matter anymore, the police will find out soon enough."

Wallace drifted back from Arlan as he watched his father crumble before him and in his place stood a whimpering and gagging man. Arlan clutched his chest before he collapsed into the bedside chair and held his head in his hands.

Wallace kept his distance from his father as he did something he'd never seen him do before, cry. Arlan's back jumped as he sucked in gulps of air and sobbed, teardrops falling from his hands as he hunched over the floor. "Andrew has been n-nothing but trouble for me, ever since he was a kid. N-nothing would have made me happier than if Andrew had died that n-night," Arlan blubbered, turning his tear stained face to Wallace.

The sight of his father's crying face made Wallace back away even further. Unaccustomed to seeing the lines of his father's face twisted and scrunched up, to hearing his voice broke and wet, Wallace feared what may come next.

"People used to whisper to me, ' _I bet you wish Andrew was your son instead, right?'_ , but n-nothing has ever been further from the truth," Arlan turned in the chair and slid out of him, slowly wobbling to his feet as he staggered toward Wallace, hand outstretched.

Wallace backed away, his head craning back as Arlan reached for him as if his empty hand held a knife. "What did he do, why did you hate him so much? It can't just be the flash drive."

Abandoning the idea of physical contact, Arlan dropped his hand and used the crook of his arm to wipe his face. "Every bad thing that has ever happened to us, he is responsible for," Arlan said. "And after everything I do for him, he still had the nerve to try and burn me."

Wallace watched with wide eyes as his father's sadness boiled away into anger. "What happened?"

Arlan sniffled and ran a hand through his hair again before he looped the chair and moved to stand by the window again. "On Andrew's ninth birthday, you spent the night at his house. You two were playing games in his room, and I left work to check on you before I went home. I walked in on Andrew pinning you to the floor, touching you, and you were crying to be let go." Arlan wiped at his eyes again and stared at his fingers for a breath, as if trying to understand what his tears meant.

"I don't remember everything, the memory has like frames of black throughout it, but I remember striking Andrew so hard that he stopped moving and I remember grabbing you and leaving. I can't remember anything else until I got you home. You were crying and didn't want to be touched so I left you alone in your room while I called Charles and told him what happened. After what happened at the river I had had enough of Andrew and I told Charles something needed to be done about him, but Charles tried to play it off, but I threatened to cut him out of the business. Charles came up with the idea of sending Andrew out on an adventure and asked me to put up with him for another year."

"The river?" Wallace asked as he rubbed at his eyes and pressed his fingers into his temples, his mind cut in half by memories of rushing water and screams for help.

"From then on, your time with Andrew was monitored and I began planning his going away party months before his next birthday, and eventually he left," Arlan said, as he spread his hands and then clasped them in front of his chest. "I was so happy. But his trip through Kalos didn't last long and as he was finishing up I was pressured on what to do next. I was just beginning to not hate him, but still couldn't handle the idea of the two of you being together again so I kept sending him off to different regions, further and further away to keep you safe."

"You're making things up again." Wallace cleared his throat and swiped at his cheeks, frustrated with the presence of tears in his eyes, unable to understand where they came from. "What happened at the river? Andrew was your pet project."

"Andrew was a thorn in my side," Arlan groaned as he cupped his side and moved away from the window. "I spent so long trying to forgive him for being a trouble maker and for always dragging you into the mud. My only regret in sending him across the world was that he became beloved and cherished and placed on a pedestal as the poster boy for my projects. I would have liked that for you," Arlan said as he cupped Wallace's cheeks.

"Why can't I remember anything?" Wallace asked, his voice growing wet. "What happened at the river?"

"If you don't remember, I shouldn't tell you," Arlan said, shaking his head as he used his thumbs to wipe Wallace's cheeks. "I was told you may or may not come to remember on your own, but that forcing you to do so might have adverse effects."

"I remember things," Wallace said, holding his father's brown eyed gaze. "It comes in flashes. The houndoom, Andrew, the tree, the river, and mom."

"Your mother." Arlan's lower lip quivered as he bobbed his head, tears trailing his cheeks. "What do you remember, exactly, what's the last thing?"

"I remember running through the trees with Andrew and finding the river," Wallace said as he closed his eyes. "We were going to catch pokémon and he'd taken his mom's pack. The houndoom found us, we thought they were nice at first, but they surrounded us. I didn't know what we were going to do, Andrew couldn't get his mom's spritzee to listen and fight, but then you and mom showed up. Milo saved us. I remember mom hugging me and Milo taking Andrew off the tree to you. I remember seeing the blood from the dead houndoom on Milo's mouth as he drank from the river." Warm tears lined Wallace's face as the memories returned to him, like his father's, cut through by frames of black where time had misplaced certain moments or things said.

"Not all of the houndoom were gone. One waited until your mother's back was turned to attack. She was okay, but she lost her grip on you. Both of you fell into the water, but you were smaller and couldn't get your feet under you. We kept losing you under the current. Milo took care of the houndoom and your mother went after you. From the shore I couldn't do anything but watch and think I might lose both of you while I tried to keep Andrew still. But she got to you, passed you off to me, but before I could get to her a bend in the river carried her further away and took her under," Arlan said, using the heel of his hands to wipe Wallace's face.

"I had Milo watch you and Andrew and I went in looking for her. I couldn't see her, or hear her, and she wouldn't answer me no matter how loud I screamed. I searched the same section of the river for what felt like hours before I realized she could have been carried further downstream, but I still couldn't find her. I thought maybe she made it out and was disorientated and ended up in the woods, so I searched there. Police came eventually and pulled her body from the river. She'd gotten snagged on a log in a deeper section of the river where the water pooled. They said that fighting against the current in clothes that were waterlogged would have tired her out instantly. She drowned, just inches from the surface."

Wallace's view of his father became distorted through moisture that gathered along his eyelashes, streaks of tears running down his face. "No!" He screeched and grabbed his father's hands in an attempt to pry them from his face, but Arlan held firm. "You told me, you said she drowned, but it was an accident, it didn't happen that day, no! She saved me, we were all okay! No!" Wallace's knees touched as his legs gave out and he sunk to the floor, his arms in the air as his father refused to let go. "No, you're lying again, stop lying to me!" Wallace pulled his arms down and covered his ears, Arlan's hands still attached to his own.

"They call it repression," Arlan said, angling Wallace's head up. "A coping mechanism you might develop to block out the events, to rewrite your past into one you'd be able to accept as a young child. You believed it was a random accident, so I went along with it and made sure no one else said anything otherwise."

"No, no, no!" Wallace seethed as his vision sheeted with darkness, the pounding his head deafening him for seconds at a time.

"I don't want to hold Andrew to blame for your mother's death, but had he not been dragging you along to every adventure he wanted to take, that day would have never happened," Arlan said as he pressed his lips to Wallace's forehead. "I can't expect you to feel the way about Andrew like I do, so if you want to see him, I'll take you to him."

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty-Two

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #31:** Do you think Arlan is telling the truth?


	33. Andrew

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Three – Andrew**

 _The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started  
_ _And know the place for the first time – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Miles from the center of Geosenge Town, away from the megalith that acted as the town's landmark, down sharp sloped paths that cut grooves through fields and around small homes, Wallace and Arlan paused before a wooden signpost that read: Marine Snow Cabins.

The night slammed down over the Pearce men in the time since they left Lumiose on the back of Arlan's noivern and stars hung like sequins over them, the acres before them waiting in shadows. Without moonlight to illuminate the properties, Wallace and Arlan moved through the cabin grounds nearly blind, often wandering into stone landscaping formations and trampling flower beds as they approached the only beacon in the area.

A cabin near the back of the large fenced in area was lit up, every one of its windows firing out yellow light. Blocks of light spread across the ground away from the cabin, illuminating random items lying in the grass around the building. Wallace slowed his pace as he came to Arlan's side, his father stopping several yards away. Through one of the windows Wallace made out the corner of an armchair and a coffee table, a stack of books lying toppled on it.

A low consistent beeping, easily mistakable for a phone alarm, came from the hood of Wallace's sweatshirt before elgyem tapped his shoulder. "Elgy?" he asked, pointing to the cabin before he flashed his yellow digit and shook his head.

Wallace nodded and adjusted his hold on Wink, pulling the water-type closer to his chest. Without tightly packed buildings like a city, the wooded area that surrounded the cabins felt almost frigid as a wind blew through, its presence signaled by the rustling of trees before it reached the circle of cabins. "What is this place?" he asked, the wind blowing a scent his way, his nose twitched at the smell of wood smoke and creosote. "Elgyem has a bad feeling about it."

"Is that right?" Arlan asked.

"Yes, that's right." Wallace rolled his eyes. Even without much light he could practically feel his father's eyebrow-raising at the mention of taking advice from elgyem. "Why are we here, what's in there?"

"The answer you've been looking for," Arlan said.

Wallace ran his tongue over a tender spot on the inside of his lip, the taste of blood and raw flesh still lingering on his tongue. A day of pacing around the townhouse, mind racing with the implications of his father's honesty and trying to recall the events that had been so traumatizing he had pushed them from his mind, had driven Wallace to biting the inside of his lip and tearing away bits of flesh until a layer of blood coated his tongue.

"He's in there?" He strained his eyes on the windows, hoping to find any sign of life inside, though nothing passed the windows. Arlan had agreed to take him to Andrew, and the cabin circle was where that promise had led them. He fought the urge to make a run for the cabin and kick the door down, the idea of what he might find inside almost too much to keep him rooted in place, but behind the thought that Andrew may be inside was the fear that he wasn't, or worse.

"Let's go," Arlan said, his steps crunching through twigs around them as he approached the cabin.

Wallace followed in silence, holding Wink close as his father peeled into the darkness just outside the first block of light before he paused by the window and touched the glass. He moved into range of the light, his head whipping side to side before he moved to the next window.

Wallace stayed beyond the light block as he followed his father's cat burglar movements, peering from window to window before he rounded the house and stopped at the only full window at the side of the cabin. The only other window was thin with fluted glass that distorted whatever was inside, a bathroom he guessed.

"Come over here," Arlan said, his face washed yelled under the brassy light in front of the window.

Wallace eyed the window as he stepped closer, his eyes crawling over every object he found inside. The room looked small and cramped with a low shelf that ran the length of the wall opposite him, a series of bookshelves and stands lined the adjacent wall that also held a television and a coatrack in the corner.

Below, he saw piles of clothes and shoes, all mens' by the looks of it. Following a line of socks and underwear Wallace's eyes fell upon a quilt that hung off a large bed, a body spread over top of the sheets, their chest rising and falling. In the instant his eyes took in the full sight of a slumbering body across the bed Wallace's eyes snapped a mental photo that knifed through his brain.

The room's only light source was a ceiling light fixed to a fan that spun lazily, casting faint shadows across the wood floor. The light from the ceiling shone down on a golden blonde boy with his limbs spread across the bed, his mouth hung open and as Wallace drew closer to the window he thought he could make out the sound of him snoring, though it may have been the putter of a generator. "Oh my god."

"Andrew's fine," Arlan said, his voice a whisper in the wind. "He's not hurt."

Wallace's mouth hung open, his hands tightening on instinct around Wink as he watched Andrew, asleep and oblivious, on the bed. Though there seemed to be an endless mound of clothes on the floor, Andrew was dressed in a blue flannel and jeans, his shoes untied, but still on his feet. "Andrew," the name exploded across Wallace's lips, no longer a name for a ghost and memories, but one that once again belonged to a living person.

"I'm going in," Wallace said, wiping his eyes as he bolted over a small garden. His frantic eyes scoured the dark ground between light from the windows.

"Wallace, wait!" Arlan shouted.

Wallace paid his father no mind as he bounded around the cabin, his hand tracing the wooden exterior until he rounded to the front. Tucking Wink under his arm, Wallace made wide sweeping motions with his free arm in search of the doorknob.

When his fumbling fingers found the knob and he tried it, locked, his heart stuttering before it kicked back to life as he twisted the knob and began to bang and pull on the door. "He's alive," Wallace gasped, trying to twist the knob off the fixture.

Arlan stumbled up beside him, his hands on Wallace's arms, trying to pull him back. "Listen to me, you can't go in!"

Wallace met his father's eyes in the dark, a pregnant pause between them as Wallace struggled to digest his father's words. Andrew rested within the bounds of four wooden walls and all that separated them was one door and his father's urgent claim that he couldn't go inside, both of which he was prepared to plow through. "Unlock the door!"

Arlan's shook moved in rhythm from side to side as he stepped back. "I can't let you go in."

"Then why did you bring me here?" Wallace roared, his cheeks burned and the night air attempted to cool him, though it did nothing to subdue his fire. "He's inside! I have to go in!" The click of a lock momentarily quelled Wallace's anger when he glanced to the doorknob and found elgyem hovering beside it, his colored digits flashing one at a time. "Elgy, when did you – did you unlock the door?"

"Elgy!" Elgyem flashed his green digits and swirled back to Wallace's shoulder, draping himself over as he propped his head upon his hands, looking pleased.

Wallace glanced at his father before he threw his body back and threw himself into the door, expecting to fly through, but only managed to slam into the wood before he twisted the knob and tumbled back. He heard his father's outcry as he nearly lost his balance and turned to face the cabin's first room.

A braided rug lay in front of a stone fireplace, charred logs resting in grey ash. A table cluttered with abandoned plates of food and cups sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by armchairs and a small red couch. The cabin was a jumble of smells, the fireplace, coffee, dish soap, and the fresh and cold scent of woodland dirt.

The cabin's exterior hadn't told Wallace much about what the inside would look like or where a bedroom might be, so he stormed forward to the first closed door he found. He tried the knob, unlocked, and swung the door open.

He caught a glimpse of a wooden wall and a bookcase across the new room before a flash of purple lit him up and knocked his feet out from under him. Wallace's stomach flipped, tumbled, and came splatting down as he struck the floor, the wood squalling beneath him.

Rolling to his back, Wallace felt Wink scurry from his arm and begin to hiss as elgyem floated over him, though the psychic-type's attention wasn't on him, it on something in the room that held elgyem's attention. Faintly aware of the click his father's shoes made as he crossed the floor, Wallace lifted his spinning head to the room to find a pokémon, brown with a large head that resembled a mushroom, staring back at him.

A pair of sickly green oval eyes regarded him before the pokémon lifted its arms and lights in red, green, and yellow flashed over Wallace. Wallace rolled to his stomach, as he watched the pokémon step closer, its brown stubbed legs carrying it to the doorway. "Beehee?" it hummed as it lowered its arms.

"Beheeyem has been staying here with Andrew since the night after his party," Arlan said.

Wallace balled his fists as he watched beheeyem move back into the room, the grotesque sight of elgyem's evolution made Wallace's stomach twist. Where the soft blue-green tones of an elgyem once had been, beheeyem was dirt brown, a color that reminded him of old leather. "Why?" he asked as he got to his feet and moved into the doorway, his breath catching in his throat as he stared down at Andrew spread across the bed, his snoring loud and jarring.

His lip snarled in disgust as he watched beheeyem make a loop around Andrew's bed. It paused, its body floating inches from the top of Andrew's head as it raised its arms, the glowing digits on its hands lighting up again as they passed over Andrew's body, the lights glowing on his fair skin before they faded away.

Elgyem climbed over Wallace's shoulder, a drawn-out mechanical hum coming from the psychic-type. "Elgy?"

"You said that if Andrew was alive then nothing changed, that he'd still be mad at me and want to expose me, and you're right, I considered that," Arlan said as he stuffed his hands into his pockets and entered the bedroom, keeping his distance from Andrew. "So I had beheeyem stay here with him. Like what I had inkay do to Charles, beheeyem has Andrew under its psychic powers. Beheeyem have the power to erase and rewrite memories, Bee placed Andrew in a kind of mental loop. Every day, Andrew wakes up in this cabin, believing it to be a new day. He thinks he's back on the road, traveling, and that he's stopped to rest in this house for the day and he wakes up every day to start that day over again."

Wallace's brow furrowed and he darted for the bed, but a hand caught his arm and yanked him back. Wallace felt his feet leave the ground again as Arlan pressed him into the wall beside the bed.

"You're not going to wake him," Arlan said, releasing his hold on Wallace, but standing firm in front of him. "I can't have that. You shouldn't have even come inside."

"What are you talking about?" Wallace asked, his eyes darting from Andrew to his father. "He's my best friend, he's alive, he's – he's here, I have to – "

"He doesn't know who you are," Arlan said, over Wallace's stuttering.

Wallace's breathing slowed, his eyes locking onto his father's. "What?"

"I couldn't risk it," Arlan said. "I know how close you were, despite my wishes. The chance that you would ever stumble upon him out here was small, next to impossible, especially if you believed he was dead. But I couldn't take the risk, so I wiped you from his memory."

"You made him forget me?" Wallace asked, his voice that of a child who discovered his best friend was moving away.

"I thought that if he ever saw a picture of you he might snap out of it," Arlan said.

"And this, this is better than owning up to what you've done?" Wallace asked. "What is so hard about just taking the blame? Being a good person for once?"

"What I've done has changed the world, revolutionized it. I help people and I did what I had to do to protect that so that one day you could take my place, make your own name for yourself, be somebody!" Arlan shouted back, his hands shaking between the two of them, occasionally smacking Wallace in the chest. "I haven't told you the whole truth about what happened the night Andrew fell down the steps."

"What? What else is there?"

"Charles was the one stealing money, not me," Arlan said. "I found that out years ago, and he was so sloppy I was afraid it'd come to the light and that would be the end of the company. I moved things around, rerouted the money, made it appear as if it came through me first, that was what Andrew found, my efforts to keep his father safe."

Wallace dug his knuckles into his temples and shook his head. "You just keep saying things and expect me to believe them."

"Bee, show him," Arlan said.

Wallace's eyes fell onto beheeyem was rounded the bed and floated toward him. "Bee!" it said, its digits flashing as it approached Wallace.

"What are you doing?" Wallace asked, pressing himself to the wall, his eyes flicking between beheeyem and elgyem.

"I'm going to have Bee show you the truth," Arlan said. "You don't have to listen to me if you don't want to. After the night was over I had Bee use his powers to take my memory of the night and replace it with the version I wanted to tell to the police. Without the memory in my head I couldn't fail any test the police or detective asked me to take, he can show you what happened."

Beheeyem drifted up to eye level with Wallace and touched the sides of his head with his hands, his digits lighting up in sequence. "Yem!"

Wallace stared at beheeyem's sickly green eyes for a moment before he felt something in the back of his mind shift, as if a gear clicked into place before a pain gripped him. He gagged, a deep and harsh sound, as pain like rods of ice prodded his brain. A sudden whoosh of wind rumbled in his ears and his vision sheeted white, and then he was moving, walking forward, or rather watching someone walk forward.

* * *

" _Drew, don't do this. You're going to ruin my family."_

 _Arlan paused, one foot hovering above the second floor carpet as he listened to the shuffling and grunting emanating from the entry._

" _Your dad tried to ruin mine first."_

 _Arlan's brow furrowed and he continued walking down the hall until the entry and the staircase was in sight. His eyes locked onto his son lying back on the stairs and then the odd sight of Andrew. He appeared to be standing on the steps, but at an angle, his arms and legs up and his face twisted in surprise as he gripped the railing and started to fall._

 _Arlan cupped his mouth, flinching, at the sharp snapping sound Andrew's arm made as he fell back._

" _Wallace!"_

 _Gripping the railing, Arlan pressed his lips together to keep from saying anything as Andrew tumbled down the stairs, his head smacking and bouncing off the steps, the railing, and the wall before he fell to the tile, his body still._

 _Tension gripped Arlan's brain, a vice attached to the front of his head that he couldn't remove as he struggled to take even one step toward the staircase. His eyes stayed on Andrew, unmoving, before he came to the top of the steps and gulped down several breaths to quell the rumbling in his gut. Wallace appeared to have frozen to the steps, as still as Andrew._ " _Wallace, what did you do?" Arlan asked, his voice warbling through his efforts to keep calm._

 _Arlan watched as his voice broke Wallace's focus, his son shaking and turning to face him on the steps. Arlan watched Wallace's chest jump with intakes of air as he gripped his knees to stop his trembling, though it didn't help._

 _Looking away from Wallace's jittery state, Arlan's mind kicked into overdrive, the vice leaving his mind and allowing his brain to churn out an idea. "No, oh no, no," he said climbing down the stairs. Each step felt like an eternity's venture to reach the bottom, a number of scenarios replaying in his mind._

 _At the ground floor Arlan inched around Andrew, as if searching for the perfect angle to approach from. As he neared the boy's feet at the base of the stairs, Arlan crouched and raised a hand over Andrew's body. His fingers shook, the muscles in his upper arm and shoulder spazzing as he touched his fingers to Andrew's neck, unprepared for what he expected to be a dead stillness._

 _Kneading Andrew's neck with his fingers, Arlan's body went limp, almost to the point of collapsing beside the boy as he felt the flutter of a pulse in his neck. The relief that flooded his system was fleeting as Arlan's head snapped up, the realization that police were on the way slamming into him. Arlan pulled his fingers from Andrew's neck, his hand balling into a fist on the boy's side as he lowered his head again._

 _Seconds or hours passed as Arlan crouched over Andrew's body, the faint sounds of the boy's breathing becoming more and more clear the longer he stayed there. Plan after plan formed in his mind, only to be cast aside until Arlan's eyes fell on a small black device in Andrew's hand._

 _He'd heard their argument, Andrew's claim of having proof of embezzlement that could ruin Pearce Productions. Without a second thought, Arlan dragged his hand down Andrew's arm and pried the flash drive free. "He's dead," he said, a finalized plan clicking to place in his mind with the flash drive secured in the palm of his hand. Arlan turned and looked up the stairs to Wallace, his eyes wide. "Wallace, the police are on their way. I heard loud voices, I thought someone broke in so I called them. If they see him like this..."_

 _Arlan waited for Wallace to respond or stand up, or give off any hint that he understood the situation, but his son remained still. "Dammit, Wallace," Arlan breathed as he raced back up the steps and gripped Wallace's shoulders. "Listen to me, Wallace! If the police get here and see him, dead, in our home, do you know what that means?" Arlan asked, the steps involved in pulling off his plan lighting up before him with every word he conjured. Growing frustrated with Wallace's unresponsiveness, Arlan shook him, knowing he could sirens at any moment. "Wallace! Answer me!"_

" _It was an accident," Wallace whispered. "I didn't mean to kill her."_

" _Her?" Arlan choked, his hands tightening on Wallace's shoulders, the image of a river's rushing waters and his wife's gasping breaths blinking through his mind._

" _I didn't mean to kill him," Wallace said._

" _I know, I know you didn't. Accidents happen, son. You would never," Arlan said, reassuring himself more than anything as he rubbed the sides of Wallace's arms. "But you can't be here when they get here, okay? I made the call, I have to talk to the police." Arlan moved his hands into the pits of Wallace's arms and lifted him, his son's legs folding under him the moment he was up._

" _Andrew? Andrew?"_

" _I'll call his dad, tell him what happened, we'll figure this out. But I don't want the police involved until we talk to Charles. Until I talk to Charles. Wallace, you cannot be here for this," Arlan said, holding Wallace up as he moved up the stairs, he knew Wallace would be the weakest link, the one to let the truth spill out if he felt guilty enough. "Wallace, go!" he urged, pushing Wallace up the steps._

 _Arlan watched Wallace take a few steps before he dove onto the landing, struggling to even stay up on his hands and knees. Arlan climbed back down the steps, listening to Wallace's heavy steps carrying him down the hall before he heard a door upstairs open._

" _Stay up there," Arlan whispered as he rushed to the base of the steps and crouched before Andrew again and withdrew a Poké Ball from his pocket and touched it to the ground. He dropped his head and rubbed the back of his neck as the ball opened under his palm and filled the dim entry with light before three colored lights passed over Andrew._

" _Bee?" Beheeyem asked as he circled Andrew, his lights illuminating the boy in a wash of colors._

" _Beheeyem, I need you to teleport this body away for the time being and return to me," Arlan said, standing. "Take it out of the house, somewhere, no one will find it, it doesn't have to be for long. Understand?"_

 _Beheeyem nodded as he floated over Andrew, his stubbed legs touching the boy's back before beheeyem waved his arms side to side and they vanished._

 _Arlan touched a hand to the tile, running his fingers over every groove and line in the tile where Andrew had fallen. Though there was no visible blood, the possibility of sweat, or saliva, or hair still existed, as he thought about how soon he'd be able to clean the entry a knock came to the front door._

* * *

Wallace watched through his father's eyes as he approached their front door and opened it, only for what waited on the other side of the door to blind him with white light as the interior of the cabin came back to him, beheeyem's arms lowering from his head.

When his father's memory faded from his mind, Wallace had slumped to the ground and something wet and warm dribbled from his nose and over his lips. He felt a pair of arms touch his face as elgyem floated before him, his ovoid eyes filled with worry as he looked over Wallace.

"Elgy...?" he asked, his red digits flashing.

"I'm okay," Wallace whispered, his mouth gummy as the fog in his mind cleared. Wink rested in his lap, oblivious.

"Beheeyem, show you the second half," Arlan said, perched on the edge of the bed beside a still sleeping Andrew.

"What?" Wallace asked, his body jerking away as beheeyem came toward him again. "No, stop!"

Elgyem shot between beheeyem and Wallace, arms out as a guard, but with a wave of his arm beheeyem sent elgyem flying across the room and into the pile of clothes below the window.

Wallace shifted forward, cupping Wink, hoping to use him to attack the psychic-type, but beheeyem's hands touched his head before he could and the same intrusive feeling of his father's discarded memories penetrating his mind froze him.

* * *

 _The same light brought Wallace back into his father's head as he stood in the entryway, Andrew's body laid before him with beheeyem in the corner as the front door closed, Charles' standing just inside. Blocks of moonlight illuminated Charles' body and face as he stepped across the entry. "A-Arlan? What happened?" he asked, his eyes falling from Arlan to Andrew._

 _Arlan cleared his throat, his plan beginning to crumble at the sight of his friend's distraught face. Every run through of this scenario he'd run since the police left hadn't counted on Charles looking as heartbroken and ready to fall to pieces as he did. Arlan averted his eyes, focusing on a painting of Oliver Pearce instead. "Thank you for coming," he said to Oliver as he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt._

" _Arlan what happened? Is he?" Charles asked, his eyes never leaving Andrew. "You told me there was an accident? What, what happened?" Charles' knees wobbled before they struck the tile and he collapsed beside Andrew. Charles' hands jittered above his son's body, his breathing becoming erratic and the sound of choking sobs filled the foyer. "Andrew!"_

" _He fell down the steps," Arlan said. "But he's not dead."_

 _Charles' hands froze over Andrew's head before his neck craned and Charles fixed Arlan in his sights. "What?"_

" _He's fine," Arlan said, shrugging. "A little out of it, but other than that, he's fine," Arlan said as he retrieved the flash drive from his shirt pocket, his palm sweaty and his fingers unable to stop shaking. "He had evidence of embezzling and was going to force me to come clean or go to the public with it. Of course, between the two of us, we know who the real thief is."_

 _Charles' eyes, rimmed with tears, widened as he whipped his head between Arlan and Andrew. "Arlan, I'm, I'm so sorry, he didn't know what he was doing, he just – "_

" _Stop talking," Arlan said. "From this point on you listen and do as I say. Judging by your reaction just now I want to believe you knew nothing about him coming here tonight, but I overheard a bit of a conversation Andrew had with Wallace before he fell. Andrew said that I threatened you and that if you kept quiet you would be prompted." Arlan aimed a finger at Charles and then dragged it to Andrew. "And one of you thought that my offering Andrew a job was a part of this. So I'm thinking, it was you who galvanized Andrew into coming over tonight."_

 _Charles' shifted, rushing to get off the floor as he stood beside Andrew and clasped his hands together in front of his chest. "It's not what it looks like. Just let me explain."_

" _No talking." Arlan closed his eyes and pressed a finger to his lips. "I'll tell you what I think. Your son stumbled across money being taken in by Pearce Productions and with me being the head of the company and the wealthiest man in the world, he naturally assumed I was the culprit and kept on digging until he had enough dirt to bury me under."_

 _Arlan moved in a slow circle around Andrew and Charles, the predator circling its prey. "He came to you with this and you saw your chance to destroy me and then maybe you thought you'd take over the company for yourself, salvage what was left, make a promise not to let the greed get the better of you like it did for me. And as a result my family loses everything because of your actions." As Arlan passed the staircase he moved further from Andrew and stopped by a pedestal, grabbing a gold medal statue off the top and aiming it at Charles. "But what would your son have done if he'd known it was you that benefited from all the income we brought in from overcharging small businesses?"_

" _Arlan, please, please, just let me explain!"_

" _I covered for you. I kept your family climbing the class system. I kept your disgusting son's perversions a secret. I am the one who took care of your family, signed your checks, fed and raised your son. What would Andrew have done if he knew the truth, Charles?" Arlan shook the statue at Charles, a chain on the statue dangling off the base. "Because those records exist, he just didn't dig far enough to find them. The transactions of misappropriated funds that are linked to each of your family member's accounts. Every battle Andrew ever won, a little extra got deposited into his account, every check you cut for yourself and Carrie has a little bit extra, never enough to raise suspicion, but enough to keep the funds coming for the rest of your son's life."_

" _Arlan! Please!" Charles' eyes flicked between Arlan and the statue, big enough to be used as a weapon._

" _But now none of that matters," Arlan said, he lowered the statue until the tip was aimed at the back of Andrew's head. "Andrew thinks I've been stealing money, that I'm a criminal, when I've done nothing but give him so many opportunities and protect his family. Wallace thinks Andrew is dead and would probably believe everything Andrew told him. Charles, you and I, we're the only ones who know what really happened. And the decision you make right now will determine both of our futures."_

 _Charles' eyes focused on Andrew the crawled to look over the statue and then to the half of Arlan's face that was visible under the moonlight. "What decision?" he croaked._

" _Wallace left, he thinks Andrew is dead, knowing him he won't come home on his own," Arlan said._

" _Why, why would he – I'm confused," Charles said, raking his hands through his hair._

" _However, Andrew is not dead, but if he was... then there is no one, but you and I, who knows the secrets of the company. Without the two of them in the way we are free to do we please."_

" _You want me to kill my son?" Charles asked._

" _I'll do it if you want," Arlan said, stepping up to Andrew like a batter to the plate. He swung the statue a few times before he backed up and gripped the statue at the base."In the spirit of complete honesty, I could have killed him before I called you and let you arrived to find his bloody corpse."_

" _If that's what you want, then why didn't you?" Charles asked through gritted teeth._

" _Because I wanted you to be a part of this," Arlan said, swinging the statue before he raised it above his head with both hands. "Because once I do this, while you stand there, you can no longer deny your involvement. And if you don't stop me we will be in this together, until whatever end meets us first. "The choice is yours."_

 _Arlan tightened his grip on the statue and brought his arms down, but before the statue had even passed his head Andrew sprung to life. His limbs flailed wildly against the tile as he struggled to get his hands and feet under him. Once he did, Andrew pushed off from the floor and lunged across the room, spiraling toward beheeyem greeted him with flashing lights._

" _Ah, shit!" Andrew gasped, stumbling back before he zipped back the way he came and ran halfway up the stairs. His hands locked onto the railing for support as his chest heaved, his deranged eyes blazing at Arlan and his father._

" _Andrew," Charles said, tears streaming down his face as he approached the stairs. "Andrew, I'm sorry."_

 _Andrew flinched and climbed up several more steps. "Stay away from me, both you, monsters!" Andrew backed away from the two men before he turned and ran up the steps._

 _Arlan gave chase, snapping his fingers which caused beheeyem to follow along behind him as he ran up the steps. He watched Andrew dip into Wallace's room and slam the door. "Bee, psychic!"_

 _The space between beheeyem, who slid to a stop before the bedroom, wavered before the door burst open and Arlan stormed in, catching Andrew in the process of climbing out the window. "Andrew!" Arlan barked._

 _Andrew tossed a glance back over his shoulder before he jumped. Arlan rushed to the window, but recoiled back a winged figure flapped past and soared into the night sky. Narrowing his eyes Arlan made out the wing patterns of a talonflame taking flight, Andrew crouched on its back._

 _Arlan pulled a Poké Ball out and tossed it outside as Charles stormed into the room._

" _Where did he go?" Charles panted._

" _Gone, I'm going to follow him," Arlan said as he climbed from the window._

" _I'll come with," Charles said, fumbling to grab a Poké Ball from his pocket._

" _Stay here and don't do anything," Arlan said. "I don't want you out there with me. I'm not following Andrew to bring him back peacefully. He was awake on the floor, listening to us for who knows how long. The plan has changed, I'm following to take him down. Bee, use psychic."_

" _Arlan, wait!" Charles started forward before a glint of purple light lit him up and his arms began to twitch before they snapped to his chest. "I..." Charles' face twisted in a sudden spasm and he struggled to raise his arms. "I... wait, Arlan, wait..." His legs folded as color drained from Charles' face and he began to sag before he dropped like a puppet. He hit hard, his head bouncing off the floor before he went still._

" _Bee, stay with him, keep him out, whatever you need to do," Arlan said before he dropped from the window. His drop was short before a solid body rose from the ground to meet him, his noivern. "Nox, take off."_

 _Noivern bobbed his head, screeching before it began to flap its wings, lifting higher off the ground until the had cleared the nearby buildings and began to pick up speed._

 _Arlan flattened himself to noivern's back, eyes straining to make out shapes against the ink black sky. There were other flying-types out, lazily soaring over Lumiose, but as he passed over hoothoot and wingull flying toward Lumiose Tower, Arlan spotted a bigger pokémon flying toward the Badlands._

" _Agility," Arlan said as he tightened his grip on noivern._

 _The dual-type dipped in the sky for a breath before it slapped the air with a mighty flap of its wings that shot them forward over the city, the outline of talonflame's wings become clear as they caught up._

" _Nox, use boomburst."_

 _Arlan watched as Andrew and talonflame flew over a flat rooftop that exploded as noivern cried out, the air rippling ahead of them. As talonflame passed the roof, rocks and dust filled the air around them and concealing them in a dirt cloud._

 _Arlan kept his sights on his target, regardless of the dust cloud wafting high into the air, but a glint of red fire in the sky caught his attention. The fire sparked into a large flare that took shape in the sky before it shot toward him. "Nox, evasive maneuvers," Arlan locked his ankles under noivern's body and tightened his grip as his pokémon tucked its wings in and made a sudden drop in the sky, only to catch an updraft and soar back up as the fire blast passed overhead._

" _Nox, dragon pulse!" Arlan said, straining to get the words out as the wind current beat against him as Nox climbed higher into the sky before he leveled out._

 _Noivern's mouth hung open as a murky orb of blue-green energy took form and he fired. The light vanished for a moment as it left noivern, shrinking into nothing more than a twinkle of light, easily mistakable for a bright star before it exploded in size and ripped through the sky._

 _Noivern took off, following above the orb as it rocketed toward talonflame who began swerving and dipping in the sky to avoid the attack. As noivern flew overhead, talonflame pulled up in the sky as the dragon pulse orb shot beneath it._

" _Strike them down," Arlan commanded, readying himself as noivern dove again, this time heading for talonflame._

" _Move!" Andrew barked, though too late as noivern head butted talonflame's breast plate and the two tumbled through the air, talonflame's wings flapping wildly as it spiraled toward the ground._

 _Holding their position in mid-air, Arlan sat up on noivern, eyes strained over the dusty field of the Badlands as he kept his eyes on talonflame who seemed to recover before striking the ground. Arlan watched the pokémon remain stationary for a breath before a glint of red flames broke away from it and shot toward him._

 _Without issuing a warning, noivern screeched and dipped to the side, letting the fire blast soar past before it dove for talonflame again who took off into the Badlands. Arlan kept his eyes on Andrew, his tanned face and blonde hair easily visible as they flew over the Badlands and swerved around rock formations._

 _As Arlan and noivern flew around a rock formation of several boulders stacked naturally, their path was blocked by another blast of fire. Noivern dove down before heading back up, taking advantage of the whipping winds that were perpetual in the Badlands to make their evasive movements as grand as ever._

 _Arlan pressed down on noivern's shoulder blades and the two of them dove toward the ground, noivern's body just feet from the ground as they veered through rocks and ledges as they followed talonflame's shadow._

" _Boomburst," Arlan said as he jammed his fingers into his ears._

 _Noivern lifted in the sky with a great flap of his wings before he shot up under talonflame, the small space between the two pokémon rippling before talonflame was thrown off course by an unseen force. Noivern flew past in time for Arlan to see Andrew leap off talonflame's back._

 _Andrew's legs kicked the air as he headed for a rocky ledge. His body tucked into a ball as he landed and rolled across the ledge, stopping near the edge. A red light struck talonflame, recalling it before it spiraled to the ground._

" _Andrew, stop running!" Arlan said, cupping his hands to his mouth._

 _Andrew shook his head and ran across the ledge before he slid across the top and dropped onto a lower ledge. Arlan flew overhead, watching as Andrew ran from slope to slope, each time getting closer to the ground until he was just a jump from the ground and he chucked a ball out._

" _Rapidash!" Andrew called out. Licks of fire shone through the light that released Andrew's pokémon before he jumped from the ledge onto the steed's back._

" _Nox, drop me off and use hurricane," Arlan said as he pulled another ball from his pocket and tossed it overhand. Noivern dipped, maintaining height several yards above the ground as white streaks of light encasing its body as the Badlands natural wind currents started to wrap around them._

 _Arlan slid off noivern's back as his ball broke open, unleashing a tyrantrum onto Andrew's path. His landing was off, Arlan landing just behind tyrantrum's head and running down its neck before he took hold of tyrantrum's fringe to regain his balance. "Earthquake," he said under his breath as he watched noivern climb back into the sky._

" _Raaaan!" Tyrantrum jutted its neck to Andrew and rapidash who slowed their approach as the dual-type stomped. The boom was enormous, accompanying by tyrantrum's roar that crashed and broke and reverberated against and over the rocky landscape._

 _The standing rock formations shook, loose dirt and pebbles flying free as the boulders groaned and popped, overstressed stone buckling. The ground lurched and Andrew's rapidash began to stagger, unable to hold its balance as the ground shook._

 _A small mouth popped out of the ground, a trapinch, followed by three more, all dug themselves free of the ground and scuttled off. From their holes the ground split, a spray of gas and dust showering the air before the ground seemed to fall away._

" _Nox!" Arlan called out, gripping tyrantrum's fringe tight to keep balance. Overhead, noivern swept down, its dark fur body concealed by visible wind currents as it passed over the battle and dove for rapidash._

 _As if it were a relay game, noivern seemed to pass off the wind currents, the wind wrapping around rapidash blew Andrew off and into the air. Rapidash's cries were muffled behind the wind as it too was carried into the air, though noivern ignored it as it honed in on Andrew, gripping the boy's arms with its claws._

 _Arlan watched noivern glide in a circle, climbing down in the sky with each turn before it ghosted over the ground, Andrew's legs kicking the moment they touched down and noivern released him. Arlan slid down tyrantrum's side and sprinted past his pokémon to intercept Andrew._

 _The two met in a blow of fists. Andrew hand came under Arlan's chin while one of Arlan's hands snagged the boy's shirt and the other drilled into his jaw, sending Andrew reeling back until he fell. Arlan paid little mind as Andrew's rapidash came squealing down to the ground, the impact of bones breaking echoing across the wasteland. He approached Andrew and stepped over him, the boy dabbing a spot of blood under his nose before he pulled another ball from his pocket._

 _Arlan growled and with a swift kick sent the ball flying out of sight before he reached down and grabbed the front of Andrew's shirt and yanked him up, only to slam him back to the ground. ""Stop fighting me! You ruin everything!" Arlan barked as he continued to slam Andrew into the ground until the boy stopped resisting._

 _Releasing his shirt, Arlan dropped over Andrew, perched on his knees as he held Andrew's head in place, his other hand pulled back into a fist. As the fist came down, angled for a perfect blow against Andrew's nose, the memory sheeted white._

* * *

Wallace sucked in air until his chest throbbed, the surrounding of the cabin filling in around him as the white light faded. His first sight was beheeyem, backing away from him, but he shoved the psychic-type away as he struggled to get to his feet, his legs numb and prickling with inactivity.

"In that moment I wanted him dead," Arlan said.

Wallace cringed, not at his father's choice of words, but at the tone of his voice. Beheeyem's projection had input his father's voice into his head and as Arlan spoke it was as if Wallace was hearing the words emanating from his own mind. "Stop talking, just stop talking," he muttered, cupping his head as he stumbled toward a wall.

"I wish I could," Arlan said during the creak of bedsprings as he stood. "But we've got a problem. I brought you to him, against my better judgement, and I know you won't leave here without him."

Wallace rolled his forehead against the smooth warm wood wall, eyeing his father as he paced before Andrew who hadn't moved. As he watched the rise and fall of his friend's chest he guessed it wasn't a natural sleep, possibly something induced by beheeyem.

"But think of what kind of problem that brings for us," Arlan said. "He's been missing for months and his last known location was outside our house, how do we explain his reemergence?" Arlan paused and shrugged. "We can't, because nothing adds up. No answer satisfies everyone, no answer makes up for the manhunt the police executed to find him. He can't leave, Wallace. So either you stay here with him, or you leave without him. I'll tell you like I told Charles, the decision affects both of our futures."

"Is that your plan?" Wallace asked, his throat dry. "Manipulate people, control them with your psychic-types if they don't do as you want?"

"It's the only way, we don't have the option of the truth anymore." Arlan's eyes grew glossy and wide as he shook his head. "You can come back to Lumiose with me, pick up the pieces of your life and move on, or stay here with him."

"I'm not leaving with you, and I'm not leaving him," Wallace said, turning from the wall. "Elgy, come here, Wink."

A soft beeping from the laundry pile grew louder as elgyem floated to Wallace's shoulder and stood there, one hand resting on the back of Wallace's head. Wink scurried across the floor, moving off course until he opened his good eye and made a beeline for Wallace and shimmied between his ankles, his jaws opening a low hiss filling the cabin.

"I can't beat you," Wallace said as he grabbed spinarak's ball from his pocket and touched the locking mechanism. The ball opened and shot spinarak onto the wall, the dual-type spinning in circles as he scaled the wood before he came to elgyem's side. "But I can try, maybe make a big enough of a scene that someone finds us out here, finds Andrew. If I die, maybe he'll live, and he can pick up the pieces of his life, because _his_ is the one that matters."

Arlan's eyes narrowed to slits, his mouth curling into a twisted smile as his hands came up and clawed at the air. "Do you hear yourself?" he seethed. "You're putting yourself on the line to save him? He's a nobody, his family are nobodies, the only reason they are relevant is because of us! Wallace, you're a king and you don't even know it, just, just acting like a peasant!"

Wallace shrugged and looked to elgyem who shrugged back, but when he looked back he was met with his father's hands coming for him. Too slow to react in time, Wallace gasped as his father's hands locked around his neck.

Wallace stumbled back to the far wall, his father's weight guiding him there. "E-E-E-El-gy..." Wallace struggled to form a single word as his father's hands seemed to close in around his throat with more force each second until he was pinned to the wall, his head smacking the wood, his view of his father's contorted and angered face blurring before him.

A loud _**thunk**_ came from behind Arlan, something striking him hard enough to loosen his grip on Wallace. Coughing and holding his throat, Wallace watched his father's eyes roll to the back of his head before he dropped. An arc of red blood spread from Arlan's head the moment he hit the ground, painting a crimson halo over him as red drops splattered the floor before Wallace.

His eyes drifted up to a pair of legs standing in front of him before he focused on the heavy end of a bedside lamp, its bronze base dipped in blood. His eyes crawled from the lamp base to a pair of hands gripping the shaft and to a pair of arms in a blue flannel and to the familiar face of his childhood friend, his platinum blonde hair shaggier and more unkempt that he'd ever seen it, but it was him. The same blue eyes he'd always known were staring back at him, worry blooming across his features.

"Are you okay? Why was he trying to choke you?" Andrew asked. "Did you know him?"

Wallace threw himself forward, knocking the lamp from Andrew's hands as he embraced him in a hug so tight his hands wrapped around Andrew and touched his own shoulders. The smells of the cabin were intensified as Wallace molded himself to Andrew, wood smoke, coffee grounds, and the evergreens.

"Hey, it's alright," Andrew said, his hand coming down uneasily onto Wallace's back. "Are you alright?" he asked, pulling back.

Wallace nodded. "I'm fine," he said, his voice breaking and falling into a raspy whisper. His eyes darted over Andrew's face, aside from a few scratches, his friend was there, whole, alive, and standing before him. Absently, Wallace's hand drifted to Andrew's hair, needing to feel that his head was in fact that dented or somehow injured from the fall in his house.

"Okay, that's enough of that," Andrew laughed as he pulled Wallace's hand down and stepped back from him, adjusting his shirt. Andrew cleared his throat and coughed into his hand. "Geez, the stuff I wake up to," he said as he rubbed his head and glanced around the room.

"Look at me," Wallace said, his voice trembling as he struggled to get in a solid breath of air. "Do you know me?"

Andrew's brows lifted as he focused back on Wallace and quickly shook his head. "No, sorry, who are you?"

Wallace swallowed the bitter truth pill that his father's claim about tampering with Andrew's memory was true. With a slow glance Wallace looked over his father's body, the arc of blood growing larger, though he had no inclination to check on him. "Look at me," he said, turning to Andrew again. "My hair is different, I'm a little darker now, I never used to go outside, but I'm tan now, but look at me, okay?" Wallace ripped his glasses from his face and tossed them aside. "Look at me, you know me, okay?"

One of Andrew's brows cocked up higher than the other, his mouth turning lopsided. "Sorry, not ringing a bell, uhh should we – check on him, I didn't mean to hit him that hard – is he breathing?"

Wallace closed his eyes in frustration as he watched Andrew crouch beside his father and touch a hand to his neck before he rolled him onto his back and bent over, his head hovering above Arlan's chest.

"I don't – I don't think I hear a heartbeat, holy shit, no way, no," Andrew gasped as he snapped back from Arlan, looking over the body in a different manner. "Is he dead? Did I do that? No way! I was trying to get him off you!"

"Focus!" Wallace snapped, grabbing Andrew's shoulders. "Look at me, do you know me?"

"Focus?" Andrew asked, his electric blue eyes darting from Arlan to Wallace. "He's dead! What do you mean focus? We have to call the police! Do you have a phone, I don't have one here. Oh god, how far is the Pokémon Center?" Andrew broke away from Wallace and began pacing the room, swerving to keep a solid distance from Arlan and the blood pool.

Wallace watched as Andrew paced, muttering to himself and pulling at his hair, sparing Arlan a passing glance every few seconds. Wallace backed away until he felt the solid wall behind him and let himself settle onto it, his knees bending as he slid to the floor. He brought his knees to his chest and cupped his head, watching his father's still body from the corner of his eye, Andrew's pacing feet passing at the edge of his vision.

Clenching his jaw until pain gripped his gums, Wallace began to huff air through his teeth, tears burning the corners of his eyes. A sizzling sensation gripped his temples, a burning feeling encased his scalp, his entire head aching with anticipation. He understood his father for once, as he knew the next choice he made would determine his future.

-F-

Wallace assumed it was impossible for the night to get any darker, but checking his phone told him two hours had passed since he first arrived at the cabin with his father and the blanket of night had fallen even heavier of the Marine Snow Cabins.

A cylinder of light from across the acres caught his eye before twigs began to snap and a man's voice could be heard. "Wally, great to hear from you, though I don't appreciate being woken up so late!" Izumi said as he stomped across the flowerbeds of other cabins, muttering moot apologies, before he stopped in front of Wallace. "What brings us all the way out to Geosenge?" he asked.

Wallace nodded to the door of the cabin and pushed his way inside. "Don't touch anything, please," he said as he led Izumi across the main room and stopped in front of the bedroom door. "When I open the door, just know we're in this together," he said, recalling his father's words to Charles. "I want you to be a part of this."

Izumi made an odd bobbing movement with his head before he gestured at the door. "What's behind door number one, is it a washing machine?"

Wallace gritted his teeth, Izumi's humor wearing thin on him already as he opened the door and stepped inside. Immediately he turned to the right, indicating where Izumi should look. As the man entered the room he nearly dropped his flashlight at the sight of Andrew curled into the corner of the room, a sock gagged into his mouth and bedsheets bound around his wrist and ankles. Beside him lay Arlan's body, his blood darkening and crusted around the edges.

Izumi's mouth fell open before he closed it and touched a finger to his lip. "Oh," he said before he wagged his finger at Andrew, but then pointed to Arlan and then ran picked at his lip. "Well, okay then, um..." Izumi turned from the scene in the corner and faced the bed where elgyem, Wink, and spinarak were sitting, acting as guards to the captive. "Hello there, um Wallace, hi, yeah see, I don't know if I should congratulate you on finding Andrew Gates, alive," he said, passing a glance to the corner again. "Or if I should question you as to why your father is lying dead beside him."

"I need your help," Wallace said, trying to offer comforting eyes and smiles to Andrew despite having attacked him and bound him in bedsheets to keep him from running to town.

"You need more than that," Izumi scoffed. "Wally, you need much more than my help."

Wallace winced, his eyes snapping shut. "Can you stop calling me Wally, unless you want to be the next dead body on the floor."

Izumi nodded as he cleared his throat and spared the corner another glance. "Why did you call me?"

"My father hid Andrew away in this cabin, wiped his memory with a beheeyem," Wallace said, skipping the boring details of everything that had happened since they last spoke. "He tried to kill me, my father, or at least Andrew thought he was going to, so he attacked him, and I tied Andrew up to keep him from telling anyone."

"What am I supposed to do with this information?" Izumi asked, his neck extended in stupor.

Wallace dragged his hands down his face, groaning. "I thought I killed Andrew, okay? We got into a fight, he fell down a flight of stairs, I thought he was dead so I ran. I left Lumiose and came up with the idea to start a new life which kind of led me to you. I needed a new start, I got it, but now this."

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you, but you're not answering my question," Izumi said, whipping around and gesturing with both arms to Andrew and Arlan. "But why did you call me about this?"

"Because Andrew cannot take the blame for this," Wallace said. "We, I, have to protect him. We have to get him out of here, no one can know about this. We can make an anonymous call, say we heard something out here and someone comes and finds my father, this all goes away."

"Murder doesn't just go away," Izumi said. "Maybe you thought it would because I helped you avoid your old life, but the police don't give up. They keep looking, turning over every stone in pursuit of the truth. The statue of limitations can last for decades, you avoided suspicion for three months. Imagine everything you've gone through since August on repeat for the next twenty years. Andrew killed your father, one of the most important men in the world, that's what they'll know. Then they'll wonder what this cabin is about, they'll search every nook and cranny for evidence. You said your father was keeping Andrew here, like living here?"

"Yeah."

"Then Andrew's DNA is all over this place. Three months of DNA in embedded into this place," Izumi said. "There's no way to cover that up."

"So we move my father's body, into the wood, someplace –"

Izumi shook his head. "The blood."

"What?"

"It won't work," Izumi said, folding his arms. "The police will wonder why he has a wound like that, but there's no blood. Wherever you put him the blood that ends up there won't match with the wound and they'll know he died somewhere else, which will lead them on a hunt for the real crime scene."

Wallace nodded, flipping through an index in his mind of a list of scenarios he created in the time it took Izumi to arrive. "So then we dispose of the body, burn it," he said as he pulled a miniaturized ball from his pocket. The purple top shone even under the cabin's yellow light. "It's my father's master ball, he keeps my mother's favorite pokémon inside, we can use it."

"Wallace! Are you hearing yourself?" Izumi barked, gripping Wallace's shoulders. "You want to protect your friend, I get it okay? But your father is lying dead on the floor and you don't even seem sad. Instead you're talking about burning a body! I can't do this, I never should have gotten out of bed, I'm out, I'm leaving, you and I, we're done!"

Wallace watched Izumi throw his hands up as he headed for the door. "Elgy, close the door," he said.

Elgyem raised one hand and swatted the air, a purple light smacking the back of the wood door and slamming it in Izumi's face. "Elgy!"

Izumi sighed and he touched a hand to the door and turned back to Wallace. "You think you're going to stop me from leaving?"

"We're not done until I say we're done," Wallace said, rolling the master ball across his palm. "Andrew is the one innocent person in all of this, if anyone deserves a second chance, it's time."

"He just killed your dad, what part of that screams innocent to you?" Izumi asked, gesturing to Andrew again. "You know who's innocent here? Me! So I'm leaving before I end up with blood on my hands, I have a business to run."

"I'm not a detective or an officer, but I know creating fake identities is wrong and creating one for a murder suspect, evading arrest, therefore a fugitive, is against the law," Wallace said, rattling off Izumi's list of offenses. "All that crap you did on the computer, making false records, none of that had to be legal. You're guilty."

"Whatever, but said it yourself, Andrew killed your father, so he's not innocent. Why defend him?" Izumi asked.

"He did it to save me!" Wallace said. "Yeah it's wrong, but he did it for the right reason. Now take him, I don't care where, just get him out of here."

"I'm taking him to your place," Izumi said as he slowly approached Andrew who began to shrink in the corner and whimper. "Stop whining kid, we're actually not the worst people in the world."

Wallace watched as Izumi struggled to get Andrew out of the corner, the bound boy flopping onto the stomach and inching away like a caterpie until Izumi grabbed him by his bound wrists and hoisted him up, carrying him bridal style across the room.

"Are you going to be able to make it to town without drawing attention?" Wallace asked, watching a struggling Andrew try to roll out of Izumi's arms.

"Probably not," Izumi said, pausing by the door.

"Elgy, can you take them home – to our other home – and then come back to me?" Wallace asked, holding his hand out to the bed.

Elgyem flashed his green digits and floated up to touch Wallace's hand before he drifted to Izumi and hovered above his shoulder. "Elgy!" he beeped, waving before the three of them vanished.

Wallace studied a spot on the floor until Wink snapped at him, although partially blind, the water-type seemed to understand Wallace's apprehension. He crouched beside the bed and scratched Wink's back and rubbed under spinarak's pincers before elgyem blinked back into the room.

"Thank you," he said softly. "I need you to take these two back next and come back for me, okay?"

Elgyem nodded and hovered back to the bed, taking his spot between Wink and spinarak, resting his arms on his team mates. Elgyem's hands flashed before Wallace's team vanished before his eyes. He ran a hand over their indents on the bed before he stood and looked over his father's master ball again.

He crouched and placed the ball on the floor, tapping the locking mechanism before he rolled it across the room. The light that spilled from inside was blinding, but Wallace couldn't afford to let it affect him as four massive paws touched down in the bedroom, a fiery presence heating the small space instantly as a pyroar stood before him.

"Milo," he said, reaching a hand out.

The pyroar roared at him instantly. The deafening sound, meant to echo across great plains, vibrated Wallace's bones as it reverberated through the room, making it feel even smaller. Despite pyroar's mighty flame warming the room, in the presence of the beast Wallace felt himself growing colder and quiet as Milo's roar drowned away inferior noises.

"Do you remember me, Milo?" he asked, daring to take a step forward.

Milo's mouth yawned open, dagger-like teeth flashing as a low growl, like the puttering of an engine started in his chest. Milo's head snapped to the side, his lips curling back to reveal the full length of his teeth as Wallace took another step. His tail lashed through the air like a whip as his claws dug into the wooden floorboards.

Wallace lowered, bending his knees, until he was crouched on the floor, losing what height advantage he had over the fire-type. Milo lowered his head, his solemn eyes taking in Wallace as his great paws slapped the floor before the heat from his mane beat against Wallace like the sun's rays.

Wallace closed his eyes as Milo raised a paw and brought it around to his back. But rather than the pierce of claws, Wallace fell forward from a solid smack as Milo pawed at him, pulling him close before the massive pokémon collapsed over him, almost smothering him.

"M-Milo, I can't breathe!" Wallace said, struggling to find air under the pokémon's fur. "You're too heavy! Get off!" Wallace couldn't help but laugh as his hands kneaded through Milo's fur and his mane, the feeling recalling moments of his childhood as Milo pawed at and rolled over him, his mouth biting gently on his thigh.

Managing to sit up with Milo's head resting in his lap, Wallace hugged the pyroar and buried his face in his mane. "I missed you," he said.

Milo settled his head in Wallace's lap, letting out a low groan as he licked Wallace's arm and playfully took his forearm into his mouth.

"We can play later, but right now I need your help," Wallace said as he slowly to go his feet, but let Milo keep his arm. "I need to burn this cabin down," he said, the words sounding odd as the filled the room. "An overheat is what I need, understand?"

Milo a questioning sound as he released Wallace's arm and licked all the way up to his elbow. He cast his eyes around the room before he paused on Arlan and stalked over. Wallace watched as Milo sniffed the body, nudging it with his nose before elgyem appeared back into the room, immediately taken aback by Milo's presence.

"It's okay," Wallace said as elgyem darted onto his shoulder and peered around him. "Milo is a friend."

Milo moved around Arlan and continued to nudge him, now in Wallace's direction.

"No, Milo, he's staying here," Wallace said. "Are you ready?"

Milo bobbed his head, his mane glowing red before the same light haloed his body. He growled at Wallace who nodded and gave the room a once over before he backed out and moved into the living room and made his way into the kitchen. He made a beeline to the stove, an old gas model. He lifted the top and blew out the pilot lights that connected to the burners before he twisted the knobs. He listened to the click of the gas coming on and quickly darted from the kitchen and out of the cabin.

He picked up his pace as he headed for the woods, not wanting to take shelter behind another cabin, he ran for the trees, stopping behind a large evergreen several yards deep into the woods. He watched the windows of Andrew's cabin in silence before red flames blew out the glass.

A vortex of superheated air reached him in the woods as shards of glass showered the cabin grounds and flames licked up the sides of the cabin. Wallace watched as flames danced across the ground, catching flower beds and wood signs on fire as it traveled across the Marine Snow grounds.

Wallace watched the nearest cabin become surrounded by flames before Milo appeared in the midst of the destruction, his body darkened by the flames before he lowered his nose to the ground and sniffed his way toward Wallace.

Pyroar pressed his head into Wallace's stomach and Wallace hugged him again, his body radiated heat as he purred, as if the explosion had somehow energized him. Although he'd grown since the last time he'd seen Milo, the pyroar had no qualms about Wallace riding on his back as they moved further from the scene of the fire.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Three

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #32:** What do you think Wallace's next course of action will be?


	34. Bad Guy

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Four – Bad Guy**

 _For love would be love for the wrong thing – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

In the waning days of autumn, snow fell on Lumiose City, blanketing the stone streets and allowing citizens and trainers to leave prints behind as they traveled the metropolis. Heavy foot traffic left the walkway outside the Pearce townhouse with a cluster of prints and dark snow as men and women with cameras and microphones paced around the property. Their devices pointed toward the house, unwilling to miss even a chance at catching a glimpse of the occupants inside.

Despite the flurry of attention the Pearce townhouse received outside, the interior was quiet, the only noise came from the kitchen as Wallace clicked his spoon against a glass bowl as he finished his third bowl of cereal for the day, his milk a galaxy of cinnamon and sugar. Letting his spoon sink below the milk line, Wallace grabbed a remote beside him and turned up the volume on the television mounted on the opposite wall above a row of cabinets.

A television studio flashed on-screen behind a news report logo that faded to reveal a redheaded reporter standing in the studio. "Nearly a month has passed and people are still searching for answers regarding the firestorm of controversy and confusion that has surrounded Wallace Pearce following the discovery of Arlan Pearce, dead, outside Geosenge, last month, of an apparent house fire," the woman said as a box expanded by her head.

Wallace watched a clip of the Marine Snow Cabin grounds taken following the fire he started, the grass scorched black and several of the cabins standing only as charred husks.

"The investigation into Arlan's death has officially been closed by police and Wallace Pearce, interim CEO of Pearce Productions had only this to say recently."

The box expanded again, overtaking the reporter as a video of a swarm of paparazzi and reporters followed Wallace down the streets of Lumiose, his townhouse growing near in the distance. A maroon scarf whipped away from Wallace's neck as he held elgyem to his shoulder and a bundled up Wink snapped at a reporter's microphone who got too close.

"What do you have to say about your father's death? Do you believe it was an accident?"

"Is it true he was harboring Andrew Gates?"

"What does this mean for Pearce Productions? How long do you plan to hold onto the company?"

"What role did Andrew's father play in all this?"

Wallace brought his cereal bowl to his mouth and slurped down the milk and cereal bits that remained as he watched himself climb the snow-covered steps of his townhouse and partially vanish inside. "My father did play a role in Andrew's disappearance from the public eye and I'm sorry for all the trouble he caused. I don't know who would want my father dead, but I am saddened by his death, thank you."

Wallace watched as the door shut the reporters swarmed on it, their camera flashes lighting up the front door before the video vanished and the redhead appeared back on screen. Wallace was quick to mute her and slide his empty bowl across the counter, sighing. "My voice doesn't really sound like that, does it?"

A series of high tone beeps came from the adjacent edge of the counter were elgyem held a food bowl between his legs, levitating pellets of his breakfast in orbit around himself. His eyes were closed and his hands pressed to his face as he seemed to laugh.

"Let's go check on them," Wallace said, sliding off the bar stool and dragging his hand along the counter for elgyem.

The psychic-type left behind his bowl of food, though dozens of pellets circled him as he walked up Wallace's arm and to his shoulder. Together they left the kitchen and rounded the entry to bound up the steps where they stopped outside Wallace's room.

With the door cracked, Wallace peered inside and found Andrew sitting on the edge of his bed while Antionette sat on the floor in front of him, using her hands as she spoke. Glancing across his room, his eyes fell onto a mountain of clothes that had gathered over the last month. Despite Carrie's wishes to see Andrew and to take him home, Wallace kept Andrew locked inside, he and Antionette his only visitors as they worked to restore his memory.

The progress had been slow and grueling, identifying what Andrew could remember and running into roadblocks as specific memories seemed to be wiped clean by beheeyem's power. "How's it going?" he asked, putting very little weight on his door as he stepped inside.

Antoinette and Andrew turned his way, the latter less pleased to see him than the Kalos Champion was. "Not good," Antoinette said. "I can't seem to find the breakthrough point."

"Can I go home?" Andrew asked. "I don't want to stay here anymore, I want to see my dad."

Antoinette smiled as she got up and rubbed Andrew's shoulder. "I've been around a lot of psychic-types and I know what they're capable of, but this is different," she said as she moved toward Wallace, folding her arms. "Bringing someone back out of a trance shouldn't be this difficult, but Andrew's been under for three months."

"Did you get him to remember anything?" Wallace asked as he looked over his childhood friend who hung his head and fiddled with his fingers.

"No, he remembers the same stuff he's known all along, who his father is, who your father is, was," she said, quick to correct herself. "Um, but sometimes I can't tell if he's remembering stuff, or if I'm just asking the right questions about things he already knows. I feel like I've been walking in circles every day with him." Antionette palmed her face and sighed. "Hey, are you – "

"Am I okay?" Wallace fired back, his eyes darting to Antoinette for a second. The woman felt the need to bring the question up every time a mention of his father slipped out, her concern never failing to irritate him. "I'm fine and I don't want to talk about it, I just want to know if he'll ever be okay."

"I don't know," Antionette said. "I've tried everything I can think of. Week one we just talked, thinking he might stumble upon a memory of you, but it never happened. Then I tried showing him pictures of you, the two of you as kids, still nothing. I started showing him other things he might remember. Trying to jog his memory, seeing if there's some kind of loophole to what your father's beheeyem did, but I hit walls at every turn. He's really unresponsive and it's only getting worse the longer you keep him here. He wouldn't stop asking about your father today. I know the investigation is over, but are you going to explain what happened to him?"

"I don't really know how," Wallace said, bringing his shoulders to his ears, elgyem gripping his head. "It was in defense of me, but this Andrew, who doesn't know me, wouldn't understand that."

"I get it," Antionette sighed before she stared at the window. "Would you mind taking over for a bit? I'm needed at the League in an hour and it's going to take a good twenty minutes to ward off the reporters outside."

Wallace nodded and moved aside to allow Antoinette to leave, but rather than head for the steps, the woman paused and spun back to him. "I noticed some luggage packed in your father's room. I wasn't trying to snoop, but I was playing hide-and-seek with your spinarak, and stumbled into your father's bedroom. You planning a trip?"

Wallace pulled the door shut, his fingers hanging off the knob as he avoided Antoinette's eyes. "I was thinking of heading back to school," he said. "I talked to one of the administrators, they said I'm still technically enrolled. even though I've missed a month of classes, my professors are still allowing me to come back."

"You want to go back to school?" she asked. "What's the point?"

Wallace shrugged again. "I just feel like I have things left to do there." Wallace's eyes drifted from Antionette to a spot on the wall, his mind drifting further onto thoughts of a dark haired boy he'd left behind.

"If you say so," Antionette said as she threw her hands up and turned to the stairs. "I'll talk to you later, don't run away without saying goodbye."

Wallace watched her descend the stairs before he slid into his room. He eyed Andrew until the silence grew to be too much and he began pacing the edge of his room. On his dresser he found Andrew's Poké Balls, his team of six and the folded piece of paper from when they were kids that listed the kinds of pokémon they dreamed of training, both of which Antoinette had used as tools to jog his memory to no apparent avail. Beside them were a stack of pictures of he and Andrew from before Andrew left Kalos.

His eyes passed over different spots in his room where they used to play, but nothing stood out to him as truly memorable until his eyes fell on his desktop. "PokéView," he said as he ran a hand over his keyboard, waking the computer up. He opened the application and paused over the login screen. "Andrew, do you remember PokéView?"

"Yeah, I'm big on there," Andrew said, avoiding Wallace's eyes. "Why?"

"And you know who made it," Wallace said, leading him.

"Arlan Pearce," Andrew said, his voice dying out. "He's dead now, right? I hit him so hard it killed him."

"Andrew, focus." Wallace clenched his fists, unable to stop himself from sighing internally. "Arlan was my dad. I'm his son, my name is Wallace. Do you remember me?"

"Arlan didn't have kids," Andrew said. "He was never even married."

Wallace's hands slipped from his keyboard, Andrew's words delivering a direct blow to his gut that left him speechless. His father had only mentioned wiping him from Andrew's memory, not rewriting his own life to exclude him and his mother. Antionette had also failed to mention that, possibly for his benefit. "That hurt more than I thought it would," Wallace cleared his throat as he turned back to the computer and typed in Andrew's username and tried several passwords, his fingers shaking and mashing down random keys. "Do you remember your PokéView password?" he asked, still mulling over the idea his father chose to construct a life without him and his mother for Andrew to focus on.

"Why would I tell you, so you can hack me?" Andrew asked as he leaned back on the bed, his brows cocking. "You're starting to creep me out. The only reason I'm still here is because that totodile is wandering around somewhere and it looks like it wants to bite my foot off," Andrew said, wiggling his toes.

"Good boy, Wink," Wallace said as he tried several random passwords before elgyem drifted into his line of sight. "Elgy!"

"Eeeee?" Elgyem screeched.

Wallace gasped as he grabbed elgyem and moved to his bed, holding the psychic-type out like a gift. "You have to remember him."

"It's an elgyem, nothing special," Andrew said, shrugging. "And?"

Wallace thought he heard elgyem gasp as the little psychic-type crossed his arms, the red digits on his hands flashing.

Wallace groaned as he released elgyem who remained aloft as he dug around for his phone and launched the PokéView app, heading to Andrew's account. "Okay, how about this, some of your old videos." Wallace clicked a random video of Andrew traveling through Saffron City, but as he waited for it to load another thought occurred to him. "My father said he put you back on your adventure in your trance, so this should be someone you remember." Wallace swiped through his gallery until he reached a picture of Arlette that Neo had sent him months ago. "You remember her?" he asked, turning the phone to Andrew. "She was your girlfriend, do you remember her?"

"Not really," Andrew said, tipping his head from side to side. "She's cute though."

"Not really?" Wallace asked, unable to control the anger dripping from his voice. "What does that mean, not really? Either you do or you don't. Antionette worked with you for a month, did she ever mention her?"

"No, I don't know, I just – I think I remember meeting her," Andrew narrowed his eyes and kept tipping his head, as if seeing Arlette from a new angle would trigger a memory. "Asking her to do something for me, I don't know. I can't remember. Maybe, she is kind of familiar."

"You have to, you have to remember," Wallace said, easing down onto his knees and cupping the phone like a sacred offering to a high power. "You have to, because she's dead, okay? She's go – ne..." Wallace's arms shook and he nearly dropped his phone, the image of Arlette's face as she fell flashing through the meat of his brain. "She loved you and wanted to know what happened to you when you went away, but she died thinking you were dead. And now you're here and she's not, so you don't get to forget her. If you can't remember anyone else, I'll make you remember her, she deserves that much at least."

"You said she was my girlfriend, but it sounds like she was yours," Andrew said, grinning. "You sound hung up on her."

Wallace dropped his head and rolled his neck all the way around, looking over his room again. Suddenly he wished he hadn't torn up the pages of Arlette's diary, or knew where to find them online before he faced Andrew again. "Focus, you said you asked her to do something for you, what was it? A favor?"

Andrew scratched the side of his head, his eyes narrowing to slits again. "I think I gave her a pokémon for something, to breed for me, I think she was a breeder. Or was it to raise for me? No, no, I think... I think I wanted her to breed something." Andrew's head clicked to the right as his blue eyes fell back on elgyem who was sulking by the window after being referred to as nothing special. "Was it... Was it an elgyem?"

Elgyem turned and touched his hands to his chest, his red digits fading as the yellow ones lit up. "Em?"

"Okay, you had her breed an elgyem for you, but why?" Wallace dropped the phone and grabbed Andrew's hand the way a child takes their parent's hand in eagerness at a carnival.

"I think it was a gift," Andrew said, eyeing their hands together.

"Andrew, a gift, a gift for who?" Wallace asked, his voice growing in urgency as his hands shook.

"Uh, just someone, I don't know," Andrew pinched the bridge of his nose and started to wipe at his eyes, his features hardening as if the memories were physically draining to draw from.

"Who? Andrew, who are they? Boy, girl, who are they?" Wallace asked.

Andrew shrugged, tearing his hand out of Wallace's grasp as he shot from the bed. "I don't know! Why does it matter? Why can't I just go home?"

"if you were giving someone a gift you have to remember who it was," Wallace said. "You wouldn't give a gift to just anyone. Try and remember."

Andrew huffed air and paced the room, scratching at his head every few steps. "It's um, it's just some guy – he's... I don't know." Andrew paused and hung his head, pressing his fingers to his temples and working them in circles. "I was away, somewhere else, Unova I think. I was somewhere, I found an elgyem following me and I caught it, I didn't want it, so I sent it to the girl, Arlette, to breed for me."

"Okay," Wallace said. "What else do you remember? Who was the egg going to?"

"A friend, maybe, I guess? I don't know, if I was giving him a gift then yeah, he'd have to be a friend. I think," Andrew said, scratching the side of his head as he walked from the door to the window. "He wasn't with me in Unova, cause I could have just given him the elgyem, or bred it there. Arlette... was in... Kalos, and I think I wanted her to hang onto the egg until I came home. So the guy was here."

"Do you remember his name?" Wallace asked. "He was a friend, you were giving him a gift, you had your girlfriend breed a pokémon for him, an egg for your friend in Kalos, who was he?"

"Uh... His name, uh..." Andrew started pacing again in tight circles, his lips forming the word his mind seemed to struggle to put power behind before it fell from his lips. "Wallace?"

Wallace stammered for his reply, but came up blank. Nothing needed to be said as the sound of his name filled the room, it seemed like nothing he tried to focus on came to him clearly. A cry bubbled from Wallace's mouth as his face split into a grin. He fell back against his bed, his chest jumping with sobs as he covered his eyes.

"You okay dude?" Andrew asked. "You don't look so good."

Wallace nodded, aware he might look crazy, smiling while tears lined his face, unable to contain his laughter and sobs as he broke through.

* * *

Days passed around the townhouse, each day bringing with it a new memory that struck Andrew at random times. Passing Wallace in the hallway on the way back from the bathroom Andrew engaged him in a simple fist-bump-behind-the-back-slap handshake they created when they were six. While playing hide and seek from elgyem, Andrew chose to take shelter in the attic, the pull down string hidden behind a curtain he had no trouble finding. The following morning Andrew ordered takeout from a nearby bakery that had been a favorite of Wallace's, remembering his order from a decade in the past.

Antoinette visited them at night with food after the boys ate their way through Wallace's fridge and with her she brought news of the investigation surrounding Arlan's death. Although the word filling the street was arson, officially, that had been ruled out as the cause of death when the discovery of a blunt wound on the back of Arlan's head came to life. Though no suspect had been named as the bedroom interior had either burned to ash or melted beyond recognition.

Wallace recalled wiping down the lamp used to bludgeon his father, imagining it as a melted pool as a result of Milo's overheat in combination with the gas explosion. Wallace pushed back from his food, his stomach twisting because he felt peace in the fact his father's he death had gone so smooth.

"I'm not saying you're out of the woods yet, but it looks good," Antionette said as she leaned over the kitchen island. "This is still crazy, I can't believe you roped me into helping for a month, and you break through beheeyem's control in an hour," she said, eyeing Andrew who stuffed with face with pizza.

"You and Izumi are the only ones who knew both sides of everything," Wallace said, shrugging. Though he did feel bad for involving Antionette, knowing what her involvement could mean to her Champion status, things had gone better than he anticipated. "Speaking of, I need to call him, excuse me."

"You'reexcused," Andrew said, between a bite of his dinner, playfully kicking Wallace off his stool.

Wallace passed his team along with some of Andrew's pokémon eating near the exit to the kitchen as he climbed the steps and plopped down, dialing Izumi's number.

"Yellow!" Izumi answered cheerfully. "Wally, how goes things as maison de la mort?"

"Things are good," Wallace said, ignoring his dig. "My father was right, I was the link to Andrew's memory, Arlette too. Once we broke through that he started remembering things one after the other. It's almost like nothing happened. Antionette has been helping a lot, keeping him updated on things and keeping him calm."

"Have you talked to him about his father yet?" Izumi asked. "Or the murder of your father? I hate to be the dose of reality that breaks up the sweet fantasy you've got going on, but these are real problems."

"I told Charles that in exchange for keeping his name out of the news he had to stay away from Andrew," Wallace said, lowering his voice in the entryway. "Andrew remembers that night at my house, he came to talk to me about it the other day. He said he remembers hearing our fathers talking about killing him to keep their secrets. He doesn't want anything to do with Charles either."

"And what about your father?" Izumi said. "I've got to hand it to you, you know how to cover up a murder better than your old man could, but is Andrew as strong as you were to live with his guilt?"

"He did it to save me, but I think after we explained what my father did, he understood why we couldn't go to the police," Wallace said. "It's not pretty, or neat, or ideal, but it's what we've got to go on right now. Him remembering me helped too, he understands why he did what he did now."

"Sounds like you've got it all planned out," Izumi said, sighing. "So what's next? Take over your father's company and rule the world?"

"Actually," Wallace said, propping the phone between his ear and shoulder as he laid back on the steps. "I'm going to let Andrew take control of the company and I'm going back to school."

"Are you out of your mind? You must be, you must have hit your head." Izumi snapped. "You won, kid. You got Andrew back, alive, in one piece. There is no murder charge to pin either of you down. If anything does come to light the whole psychic trance thing is the perfect alibi because he can say he can't recall anything about when Arlan died. Wally, you stuck us all in your town car and drove us through hell, but somehow we all came out the other side unburned, well, most of us."

"You're right, but I left a lot behind at school," Wallace said, his mind wandering to the dark haired boy he left behind on the roof balcony. "I didn't think I'd get the chance to go back, so I didn't think about how I left everyone. There are unfinished things for me there."

"The Orphans?" Izumi asked.

"Yeah, them too," Wallace said. "That's another reason I can't have Charles around, he went to Sonai Enterprises to get back at my father. I can't trust him. But the Orphans are still out there at the school, doing who knows what since I left."

"Well, not like I've been paying close attention, but the school seems to be still standing. But I still think it's a bad idea, I'm telling you," Izumi said. "Wallace Peters died in that fire with your father. You can't be him anymore, you've got to be yourself and own up to every lie you ever told. Can you do that?"

"I have to try," Wallace said, shrugging his shoulders to his ear. "I owe myself that."

"Yeah, okay, well call me when you find yourself in the deep end unable to swim," Izumi said over the sound of a chair creaking in the background. "See ya, kid."

Wallace pressed his phone between his palms, staring ahead at the front door when Antionette came out from the kitchen, shrugging her coat on.

"I'm leaving for the night," she said. "Everything okay?"

"I'm fine, thanks for stopping by." Wallace nodded and hummed at her. "I'm leaving for school tomorrow, so I just wanted to say bye, that's why I asked you to come by tonight."

Antionette forced a smile as she propped her hands on her hips. "A proper goodbye from Wallace, what a treat," she said as she crossed the entry and climbed the steps, falling over him as they embraced in a hug. "What a fine mess your life is, but somehow you're making it work."

"Can I ask why you decided to help me again?" Wallace asked.

"I didn't think you were a bad person when we were met, just a little lost," Antionette said as she backed up down the steps. "I wasn't really following the investigation into Andrew's disappearance and didn't really know what I was setting into motion when I went to the police. I was trying to help when I saw your picture on the news, but I think I did more harm than good. Really I'm surprised you called me to help with Andrew."

"Not too many people know the whole truth," Wallace said. "You were nice to me back then and you didn't even know me, I'm glad you did come when I called though."

"Of course!" Antionette said as she headed for the door. "See ya, kid."

Wallace waved as Antionette left, the faint flash of a camera lighting her up as she stepped outside. As the door clicked shut, Andrew's head popped out from the kitchen. "Yo," he said. "What are the plans for tonight?"

"I actually need to talk to you about something," Wallace said. "You said you remembered enrolling to Radix University, right?"

Andrew nodded as he came to stand at the base of the steps, leaning on the railing. "Yeah, I was pretty much ready to go, just had to pack. Why?"

"One thing I left out was that I actually ended up going there," Wallace said, the confession sounding as if he was trying to live Andrew's life in his absence. "It was kind of awful, but I was thinking about going back, soon, like tomorrow."

"Oh," Andrew's mouth turned down, a bit of light fading from eyes. "What am I supposed to do? I can't really go anywhere, there are reporters everywhere looking for me," he said, glancing over his shoulder to the door.

"Antionette will still come by and hang with you," Wallace said. "You've got my number, plus I have a friend in the city who worked for my father, maybe you and him can start hanging out? His name is Jason. I can't really think about taking over my father's company, but I think you could do it. Jason can help you."

"Kind of feels like you're ditching me for your other life," Andrew said, turning his eyes to a spot on the steps.

"It's not that, I just have unfinished things there, but if you really want to come with me talk to the school and come for the spring semester," Wallace said. "Everyone there loves you already, it'll be a breeze."

"I guess," Andrew said, shrugging. "Though, I only wanted to go there to hide from your dad and because of – Arlette, but neither of those is a factor anymore."

Wallace tried to offer his friend a smile, though it faltered the moment his lips began to curl. In the days following Andrew fully remembering Arlette came the explanations of how she'd died, though Wallace chose to omit his presence at the school at the time and his role that drove her to the rooftop. "I'm sorry," he offered, wondering if Andrew would put two and two together.

"I know," Andrew said, shrugging. "I just feel stuck, like I want to do so much to make up for the months I lost, but the most important things don't matter anymore, or they're not around to matter. My father jeopardized everything by stealing money, your dad tried to protect him, my girlfriend took her own life, and I'm just... here. It feels like everyone's life went down a spiral because they thought I was dead and now I'm here, but the damage is done, you know?"

"I get it," Wallace said. "I get it more than you know."

"Huh?"

Wallace smiled and shook his head. "I'll tell you another time."

* * *

The following morning, opting to let Andrew sleep, Wallace gathered his team and his luggage in the foyer of the townhouse. "Maybe I should come back for the luggage," he said, kicking the side of a black trunk filled with clothes. "I came to school with just a duffel bag, it's going to be weird to bring all my stuff now."

Wink stalked around a pair of standing totes, snapping his jaws before Wallace grabbed him. "Time to get dressed," he said as he brandished a puffy jacket he ordered online for Wink.

"Totototo!" The totodile thrashed and screeched as Wallace slipped his limbs into the jacket and zipped him up. The fabric was dark purple and made Wink look twice his size, but covered most of his scales as Wallace flipped up the hood that fell over Wink's eyes.

"Elgy, ready to take us back?"

Elgyem slid down Wallace's shoulder and fell onto the cushion of Wink's jacket before he shone with purple light and the clean tile of the foyer vanished. Wallace watched the muted colors swirl and come to life with dusty greys and pale blues as he appeared on a beach.

Water lapped the heels of his boots as he stood at the water's edge where the bay water touched the shore, melting the snow, giving the snowfall a curvy border against the sand. Wallace brought his shoulders up against a stiff wind from the water as elgyem climbed back to his shoulder and he held Wink close and he started up from the beach toward campus.

Campus under a layer of ice and snow was a beautiful sight. As Wallace passing the iron archway, he walked down the walkway where machop were tossing handfuls of salt out to melt the ice. The squares of grass that dotted campus between buildings and paths were replaced by plains of undisturbed snow and the occasional snowman.

As he passed the fountains, the water shut off and the grey stone blanketed with snow, Wallace took note of the silence that filled the school grounds. Despite there being no classes on Sunday, he hadn't seen a single person moving between buildings in a bundle of winter apparel. No flying-types circled over the buildings and aside from pokémon completing tasks like spreading salt and shoveling snow, the campus was dead.

As he approached the ICO, Wallace's steps slowed. He looked over the snow covered stones of the Bellerose Courtyard, most of the flowers untouched by snow due to the trees above as he approached the golden plague. He brushed away the snow, clearing off Arlette's dedication as he hovered over it. "To kindness and grace in the face of adversity, a dedication to the life and studies of Arlette Bellerose," Wallace read, his gloved hand gripped the edge of the plaque.

A cloud of his breath filled the air before him as he sighed and left the courtyard, heading for the steps. Wallace flashed his wallet, his ID inside, before he entered and felt the welcoming heat of the ICO lobby. Like the grounds of campus, the halls of the ICO were vacant as well. The halls were void of another human's presence and even sounds as Wallace heard nothing as he passed bedrooms. The sight of his dorm door stuck a chord in him at its normalcy. A plain wooden door, no notes, no graffiti as he expected, and the fact that it wasn't for some reason taped off as also a surprise, surely the police or reporters have stormed it looking for something.

Though the hall had been warmed, as Wallace unlocked his door and stepped inside, he was met with the same chill from the outdoors. He didn't bother to turn on the light, as the blinds were up, exposing the three open windows that had left snowfall inside to coat the window sill.

Wallace looked over Wink's pool, empty and toppled into the corner of his room, the side dented in as if someone had kicked it out of their way. Nevertheless he laid the pool flat and placed Wink inside, the water-type's claws scratching against the plastic.

It was the stillness of the room that made Wallace shiver, not the temperature. His bed remained as he'd left it the day he attended Arlette's memorial, his clothes remained in the closet and everything he'd left on his desk was there, but the other side of the room had been stripped.

Garret's bedding was gone, leaving only the flimsy blue mattress behind. His desk was cleared and his television was gone. Wallace slid open the closet doors, hoping to find at least a jacket inside, but it too was empty, as if no one had ever shared the room with him. Still, Wallace checked the overhead cabinets as well as every drawer in the dresser, thinking he might find a note, a scrap of paper, a sock, but only dust remained in the room.

As he moved toward his bed and plopped down, the frigid sheets sending him shooting back up, Wallace could picture Neo kicking the pool into the corner as he barked orders at Garret to get his stuff and move out. He wondered if Garret was back to sleeping on Neo's floor as he moved toward the window and glanced down at the yard behind the ICO. Where Willow and Sienna had battled, the yard was hidden beneath the snow, no prints showing any sign of life or activity.

As Izumi had said, Wallace Peters had died in the fire, though it looked like his life as a student had perished under ice. A foreign sound, a knock on his door, startled Wallace through the silence.

Wallace deposited elgyem on his dresser as he moved toward the door and opened it without hesitation. A number of faces could have been waiting on the other side for him, but Don's hadn't crossed his mind. A dark green beanie rested on top of his head, containing his dark hair and he looked as bulked up as Wink did wearing a dark green coat and a scarf that swallowed his neck and chin.

"Cosmo said he spotted you on campus and texted me," Don said, taking small steps inside.

Wallace backed away as Don entered and slowly shut the door behind him, his nerves keeping him from saying anything. With the click of the lock Wallace watched Don make a concerted effort not to venture far into the room, stopping near the middle he undid his scarf and with several snaps, shrugged out of his coat, folding It over his arm.

"It's cold in here, but I guess it's colder outside," Don said, turning to face Garret's bed. "Your roommate moved out."

"I guess so," Wallace said, his voice a whisper. Speaking, Wallace realized he wasn't nervous to stand before Don, he was afraid.

"I'm nervous." Don waved to Wink and to elgyem before he turned to Wallace, his green eyes darker without any added lighting in the room. "I don't know why I came here," he said, shrugging slightly.

Wallace furrowed his brow, forcing him to watch Don's feet. "I'm glad you did, I want to tell you something," he said.

"What? You sound serious," Don said, clearing his throat as he buried his hands into the folds of his coat.

"I am serious," Wallace said, daring a step forward that made Don take one back. Wallace eyed his feet, the toe of his shoe digging the tile as Don backed up again. "What are you doing?" Wallace asked as his eyes trailed up Don's body to find Don glancing at the walls, his cool façade shattering.

"What? I'm nervous, what?" Don asked, shrugging again. "I wish your roommate was here."

"Well, he's gone, why would he need to be here?" Wallace asked.

Don bit his lip and rocked on his feet. "Because I feel like you're going to hurt me."

"I wouldn't do that," Wallace said, stronger. "I just don't know what to say, or how to say it, I'm nervous too."

"Just say it," Don said, his shoulders shrugging up even further.

Wallace exhaled and took to pacing, the only thing that he thought might comfort him, the quiet undertones of their conversation and the stillness of his room too much to bear. "So, I've been feeling some type of way, about you."

"What does that mean?" Don asked, his face burying into his scarf. "About me?"

Wallace paused in front of his door, wishing he could bust through it, leaving behind a body shaped hole, and escape from the conversation. "I'm single. You're single. And I've been thinking about those type of things, if that makes sense."

"It doesn't," Don said.

"I mean, we kind of got close because of your brothers, and you helping me," Wallace said, walking a line in front of his door. "I'm just gonna say it." The sound of wooden drawers moving caught Wallace's attention. Turning, he saw Don supporting himself against the dresser, his free hand linger over his chest.

Elgyem flashed the yellow digits on his hands at Don as he drifted away from the boy. "Elgy?"

"Are you okay?" Wallace asked.

"My heart is beating, really fast," Don said, staring at his chest as if he expected a cartoon imprint of his heart to beat out from his sweater. "What are you trying to say, I – I feel uncomfortable, nervous."

"I have feelings for you," Wallace blurted, his voice bouncing off the cold walls and slamming back into him. "Like in a romantic way. But I didn't really think about them until recently, when it felt like my life was put back together. I'm not going to act like you're dumb and don't know, because I know it's been everywhere on the news, who I am, my father, all of it. But I started to think if I didn't have to hide anything anymore, I thought that maybe I could get to know you better, or we could know each other."

Don clutched his chest, his eyes narrowing. "Wallace, what?"

Wallace stuffed his hands into his pockets, unsure of what to do with his arms as Don fixed him in his gaze. "I mean, I think you're really nice, and supportive, and kind to people that don't always deserve it. And I'm thankful for the times that you've helped me or tried to be there for me, but I think I appreciated it more because I really like you," Wallace said, blowing air from his mouth as he spoke the last words, his breath lightening the impact of his confession. "It's because of that and I liked Tempest, and I think I liked Azalea, for a moment, but nothing feels right, I told you that, nothing feels as good and while I was away I was just trying to clear my mind, now that all of my other drama is out of the picture, I wanted to clear my mind, for you. And that's what's been going on."

Don made a low noise in his throat. "I mean — I can't — I mean, are you sure?"

"I've been taking care of a few things while I was away, but at the end of the day, it's all I've been thinking about, non-stop, I can't stop thinking about it. I think I'm really sure."

"You have feelings for me?" Don asked.

"Yeah," Wallace croaked. "You're awesome," he said, mentally face palming.

"I'm just me," Don shrugged, glancing at himself in the mirror.

"You're not just you, I mean, I don't know how you're not seeing someone," Wallace said. "You're awesome," he said, wishing he could just stop talking.

"After we kissed, I just thought you'd be a good friend, someone I could talk to..." Don said. "I'm sorry if you thought –"

"It's been building from that night," Wallace said. "I didn't really know what kind of friend you'd be after that, but I think it's cause I want you to be more than a friend."

"I think you're — I don't know what to say, Wallace. You just hit me out of nowhere, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from," Don said. "I was out of my mind when I kissed you, and I just don't know. I just I'd come here we were going to talk, about what's been happening, but I think I should go, it's weird." Don made a move toward the door and Wallace shifted back, falling against the door.

"No, please, don't leave," Wallace said.

Don faltered, taking a few steps back, making an effort to maintain a distance from Wallace. "It's just — I don't know what to say — I'm awkward, uncomfortable."

"Don," Wallace said, his voice low.

"What?" Don said, shrugging, his voice rising high as his eyes flicked across Wallace's face and then to the floor, unable to focus on anything.

"It's okay, you don't have to leave."

"I think I do, I just don't know what to do, I don't know if I should even take a step because I don't know what that one step will mean to you. I can't think straight. What am I supposed to do, I don't want you to feel bad."

"Why would I need to feel bad?" Wallace asked, stepping forward as he opened his arms to Don. Don's face scrunched up as he moved back, but bumped into Wink's pool that he dipped around, placing it between him and Wallace. "Really?" Wallace asked.

"I'm serious, this is awkward," Don said, gripping the metal frame of Wallace's bed that began to rattle from his touch.

"Don, you're shaking."

"This is awkward!" Don yelled. "I feel bad, I feel so bad like I — I don't know, I just need to get out of this situation, this is bad. I want to cry because I feel terrible — I mean — I — no — I don't know – I – I – I." Don mumbled and wandered through the corner of the room he'd backed himself into. "I just... Wallace, I don't feel the same way about you, and that's why I want to leave, because I feel like you're wanting something I don't want and I feel trapped."

"What do you mean you don't feel the same? You kissed me?" Wallace asked.

Don's mouth opened, his chest puffing out, but he remained quiet as he gripped the bed frame harder. "I don't know."

"When I told you I liked you, why didn't you tell me then if you didn't feel the same," Wallace asked. "What's different now?"

Don's eyes flicked to Wallace, his flat expression relaying the message Wallace already knew, one he didn't need repeated. "You're not wearing your glasses," Don said.

Wallace looked to the mirror. In an act of his two lives colliding, an imperfect circle, Wallace folded his glasses up and put them away, putting his contact back in. His hair had grown in since his last cut and the dark coloring from homecoming had begun to fade, dirty roots sprouting on his scalp.

"Everywhere I went, no matter what building it was, whose room it was, what time of day it was, the news was on and they were only talking about you," Don said. "Professors started deviating from their lessons to discuss what was happening and how it would affect your father's company. Who you really are came out first, then your father was declared dead. Then came the fact that Andrew wasn't dead. Then everyone started cried, dropping flowers off for Arlette, apologizing, but now it's all back to you."

Wallace watched Don in the mirror, the boy facing him, but Wallace couldn't bring himself to make eye contact and instead focused on Don's cheek and the clenching his jaw made every time he stopped talking.

"Everyone wants to know who you really are, why you lied about your name, where you came from," Don said. "People started coming together and sharing stories, things you told them that never made sense, but now they understand. You were always a mystery to people in Kalos, apparently, Wallace Pearce."

Wallace snapped his eyes shut, a burning sensation causing his eyes to water. "Don, please."

"So now people are trying to figure out if who you were when you were here was real, or if it was all an act," Don said. "I'm trying to figure that out too. So that's why. That's why I can't like you back. Because I don't know who you are."

"You know me, I – "

"I don't!" Don yelled, his fists coming away from the bed and balling into fists at his side. "From the moment you told me your name was Wallace Peters, you started lying to me, to everyone, and everything you said after that was a lie. I don't care if there were bits of the truth mixed in, if you really like the color red, and like sunsets, and ice cream, it was all told under the pretense of a lie. And people have lied to me before, and I forgive them, but what makes you so different if that there's a shadow around you. One of death, and mystery, and bad things and I don't – I don't want to be with the bad guy. I can't thank you enough for what you did for my family, looking after us, but don't feel like you're obligated to do that anymore."

Wallace remained rooted in place as Don inched around the pool and darted toward the door. "I don't think there's much left here for you, you should just go back to Lumiose," Don said before the door hinges squeaked and he closed the door behind him.

* * *

In the time that passed following Don's departure, Wallace closed the windows, the bursts of wind that intruded the room wearing down on his nerves. He let Wink practice his water gun by filling the pool and let spinarak and elgyem play around the room before he grabbed a towel and some toiletries from his dresser and headed to the bathroom.

Like the rest of campus, the bathroom across from his room was empty and cold. He cranked his shower's water up until he couldn't stand it and turned it a little more. The silence, interrupted only by the patter of water dripping from his body was relaxing as Wallace scrubbed his skin, hoping Eleanor's advice about self-care might come in handy again. As he lowered his head under the water he hoped he'd emerged from the steam and heat with a clear idea of his next move.

After about fifteen minutes under the jet stream, Wallace dried off tightened a knot in his towel around his waist and waddled out of the shower row, careful not to slip in pools of water that spread across the tiled floor from his shower. But when he turned the corner into the entry, Wallace skidded to the stop, nearly slipping and falling. The population of the boy's bathroom had increased since Wallace first came in. Willow and James, Chara's underlings, stood in the entry, James by the sinks and Willow blocking the door.

Wallace's eyes darted to Willow's head, beyond her white hair, braided around her temples, he spotted the bathroom door's lock, turned to keep anyone from walking in.

"Looks like everyone knows who are you now, Pearce," James said. The half of his face that received the poison sting appeared glossy and white under the bathroom lights, his eyes narrowing into slits at Wallace.

"I'm all caught up, Wallace, I know it all now." Willow crossed the room and reached forward to grab Wallace's head. His hair was just long enough for Willow to take a fistful of before she dragged him towards the sinks, her strength surprising him as she slammed his face down onto the cold porcelain edge.

Wallace sputtered up blood and a plea for her to stop when James' foot swung up and wedged itself into his ribcage. Willow's other hand gripped the side of Wallace's head before she whirled him around to slam his head against the wall before she released him and let him stagger and collapse onto the floor.

Blood boiled from Wallace's lips as his eyes slurred the image of the fluorescent lights above before James squatted over him. The last thing Wallace saw was James' fist coming for him before his nose broke open.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Four

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ With this chapter I guess I'm halfway through writing this story. I'll be taking a small break from updating as I wrap up another project and start work on another, as well as plotting the second half of this story. I hope you'll reserve the darkest part of your heart for Wallace until my return.

 **Question of the Chapter #33:** Do you think there is any place Wallace belongs?


	35. A Place The Gods Forgot

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.  
 **Warning:** Minor gore warning.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Five – A Place The Gods Forgot**

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute,  
and yet relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself  
and yet never escapes itself. - T.S. Eliot

* * *

 _As fast as his petrified legs would carry him, his heart pumping blood back through his limbs, his nerves firing impulses to his brain, Wallace threw himself toward a marble staircase. With his frantic eyes scanning the landing strip behind him, he failed to notice a gap in the staircase, the result of several slabs of marble falling away. His foot struck the edge and without time to comprehend, he fell and slammed onto the cold floor beneath._

 _The impact radiated throughout Wallace's left side, awakening the dying pain in his side. He rolled to his back, cupping his midsection, holding back tears as the most unfamiliar of pains, what he guessed had to be a bruised or broken rib, throbbed throughout his chest. A deep breath in worsened the pain, gagging Wallace and bringing tears to his eyes. Everything hurt. Following the ambush in the bathroom, Wallace face was a map of cuts, bruises, and crusted blood while sections of his body below his neck ached for different reasons. The phantom pain of chains lingered on his ankles and wrists, his bottom ached from days spent confined to a stone bench while his legs, arms, and chest pulsated with memories of fists that marked him with oblong bruises. All gifts of four days with the Orphans._

 _Gritting his teeth while sucking in shallow breaths was all Wallace could do to keep from crying out and exposing his location. As he forced his eyes open, his stunned gaze fell to the opening he'd fallen through on the underside of the mansion's main staircase. Odd warped scorch-like marks marred the underside of the staircase, like swirls of translucent paint with the gap at its center. His eyes dropped to the missing slabs beside him, stacked over the body of James._

 _The sight caused him to sit forward, his upper body snapping up as he cupped his mouth. Wallace's eyes tracked from the curve of the Orphan's ribs to the slope of James' waist that thinned to naught then disappeared in a wide and spreading blood pool. The weight of the marble slabs had slammed so hard onto James that what hadn't flattened, burst from his stomach. The way a child might stack and confine laundry to the area of single chair seat, a gory and glistening tangle of intestines piled on his stomach._

 _Wallace gagged behind his hand at the smell as his eyes seemed to hone in on the smallest details, rivulets of blood leaking from the innards._

" _W-Wallassss."_

 _A sputtering wet hiss drew Wallace's attention to James' face. The boy's pale face looked void of all color as he lay in the pool of his death. Blood, brighter than he could have imagined, boiled from the Orphan's lips as he tried to speak. Wallace narrowed his eyes on James' face, whose eyes struggled to focus. One seemed to fix an inch away from Wallace's face while the other roved off-center, searching for Wallace as it verged on rolling to the back of his head._

 _Torturing himself by studying the mass of James' innards, Wallace realized though they had spilled out, it was possible that nothing had severed and like a decapitated creature whose feet remained moving, James' wasn't ready to give up._

 _A spastic motion drew Wallace to the sight of James' hand, his fingers clutching a Poké Ball. He watched as James' knuckles lifted from the ground, the shaking of his hand growing with intensity the higher he attempted to raise the ball._

" _Garrchh," James breathed, his hand hitting the floor as his fingers started to tremble._

 _Wallace reached for the Poké Ball, the echoes of a battle ricocheting through his mind. He hadn't seen it, but he heard the sounds of the battle that brought the marble slabs down onto James throughout the mansion. His fingers hovered inches from taking the item from James as his eyes fell on another stack of broken marble lying behind the Orphan. A place under the stairs that, in James' current condition, would have been an impossible task for him to find with his misalligned eyes._

 _The body of a garchomp lay several feet from James, posed as it the pokémon had fallen over, asleep, with his hindquarters in the air, though the marble slabs quashing its head said different. As James' lower half had become flattened, the garchomp's neck trailed off into a flat mess of scales and blood beneath two thick chunks of marble._

 _Wallace clutched his shoulder, the phantom weight of elgyem's missing body aching in a different way than any physical pain could ever hope to._

" _Wallace, if you want to know about us, I can tell you, but first I'd have to show you the existence of human life on the blade of a knife."_

 _Wallace shuddered, a presence in the air causing him to flatten to the floor as a voice called out to him from above on the stairs._

" _You might think that human lives exist on a linear surface, like, hmm, the back, dull, edge of a blade. I mean, it's a flat cold surface, easy for someone to drag their hand across, it looks appealing. So I can't blame you if you think that humans exist equally, capable of making a smooth transition from the base of the blade to the tip, but you'd be wrong."_

 _Clicks on the marble above gave Wallace an estimate of his follower's steps and gave him time to scurry to the acute angle of the steps. He laid himself in the shadow of the dead garchomp's body, the rank and feral stench of its head, popped and smeared across the floor gagging him._

" _Life does exist on the knife, but not on the dull back. Life is played out along the saw-toothed cutting edge of the blade. Our lives and stories are nestled vertically within serrated grooves. There exists a hierarchy, one you have to conquer if you desire a chance at a quality life. But what the humans who live along the notches fail to realize is that their life exists under the curve of the blade, and that there, at a top, on the insurmountable pinnacle, are others."_

 _Wallace cupped a hand to his mouth as he watched a figure leap over the gap in the staircase and continue its descent to the ground floor where he heard their movement stop._

" _That's where my life started, under the curve of the blade, in a land of serration where I crossed paths with a professor, was handed a starter, and filled my mind with dreams, though the images that filled my head were geared more toward blood and bones than battles and badges. And then there's you."_

 _After moments of stillness, Wallace heard footsteps clicking past the staircase, approaching his hiding spot. He pressed himself harder to the ground, hoping his presence would go unnoticed behind garchomp, despite the sight of James and his fallen pokémon being capable of garnering anyone's attention._

" _At your end of the blade there was fortune, opportunity, and love, and at mine was death, loss, and betrayal. Those of us from the bottom longed for a life anywhere in the middle of those two extremes, but that's not how life works. The rich can't exist without the poor, the pinnacle cannot exist without polarizing the nadir. The gods can't favor one without shunning another."_

 _The moment the high black heel of a boot came into sight on level with Wallace's line of sight, a door across from the staircase flew open and Chara staggered out. Wallace looked away from the boot to Chara, whose face looked flushed, his dark brown hair matted to his forehead and his chest heaving with intakes of air._

" _They got away," Chara breathed, his attention on the figure who stood steps away from discovering Wallace's hiding place._

 _Another heeled boot joined the first, the thin legs of Wallace's pursuer, clad in skin tight black jeans, crossed at the ankles as they approached Chara. "It's okay," they said._

 _Peering past garchomp, Wallace watched a female reach out to Chara and caress his face, a pair of manicured nails pressing lines into his skin._

 _Chara's eyes closed as he pulled his face from her grip and flashed a look toward James. "What about him?"_

" _Get him out of here, he's going to stink up the place," the girl said, her tone relaying how she viewed James' death to be an inconvenience._

 _The hairs on Wallace's neck bristled as he listened to Chara's heavier footsteps approaching. "Who were you talking to?" he asked._

 _Wallace listened to Chara sigh, followed by a shuffling sound and a faint mechanical click. The origin of the sound hit Wallace a second too late as garchomp's turned red and the corpse vanished in front of him. Even if his body sprawled across the floor wasn't enough to garner their attention, marble slabs collapsing onto the floor ensured he didn't go unnoticed. Wallace watched Chara's eyes grow wide in surprise, only to narrow in anger as eyes met._

" _Wallace," Chara growled._

 _Wallace's eyes flicked away from Chara as he pressed his hands to the floor, his knees bending and the rubber tips of his shoes bending at he prepared to run._

 _The girl had one hand cocked on her hip and the other to her mouth, her nail between her teeth as she smiled. Her skin, the color of warm honey shone under the mansion lights that cast highlights off her thick waves of pitch black hair. "Wallace, if you want to know about us, I'll tell you that we come from a place the gods forgot."_

 _In the corner of his vision, Wallace saw Chara's hand vanish behind his back. Without waiting for a Poké Ball or knife to appear, he took off. Without garchomp in his path, Wallace vaulted over the stacks of marble with ease and took the gap between Chara and the girl as his exit._

 _Though his eyes locked on the door Chara had arrived through, Wallace pivoted to the right, moving behind the dark haired girl as he darted for the steps. He could hear the sound of Poké Balls breaking open on the floor as he clattered up the steps of the main staircase, taking the marble steps two at a time._

 _A metallic cry cut through the air and a strike against the steps that caused the stairs to hitch. Wallace slipped, his weight thrown off center by the attack on the steps as he neared the gap._

" _Emma, another iron tail," the girl said._

 _Wallace's mind screamed at him to get moving as he climbed the steps on hands and knees and leaped over the gap, his chin smacking marble as he landed, his legs dangling over the gap. Scrambling toward the landing strip, Wallace struggled back to his feet and ran toward the right hall as the floor beneath him shuddered with attacks._

 _In the distance he could hear the girl calling out attacks, the walls behind him exploding and filling the hall with dust and chunks of plaster. His panicked eyes darted toward every room he passed in search of the hole Neo and Don's battle in the library created months earlier._

 _At the corner of the hall, to his left, a thin blue-white light sliced through the floor. Wallace flinched back as he watched the beam of light slice from side to side, tearing through the walls and the ceiling until the floor fell away. The sound rattled him as a cloud of grey dust billowed through the hall. Wallace shielded his face from the dust and grit as he watched part of the floor collapse several yards ahead of him. Through the cloud came the faint outline of a body as the girl came walking up the incline the fallen floor created. A glaceon stalked alongside her, its fur shining through the grey cloud._

 _The clip of hooves in Wallace's blindspot stopped him from turning backing, instead he tossed a look over his shoulder as Chara and a gogoat blocked one path of escape. Before either party could make a move, Wallace dove to the right and slammed through one of the doors, staggering into the mansion's library._

 _The sight of walls lined with books ignited the memory in Wallace's mind of the day he'd met Don. Spinning, Wallace faced the blown out section of the mansion, broken wood jutted out over the hole large enough for him to fit through. Without hesitation he ran for it and jumped._

 _In the seconds his body flew from the building the thought occurred that the fall could kill him, but that threat was a possibility. The threats inside the mansion were promises. As the ground neared Wallace tucked in his legs, bent his knees, and started to roll to avoid landing on his bad side._

 _Despite his preparation for impact, Wallace hit the ground like a rock. His plan to hit, roll, and keep running shattered as he landed at an odd angle, rolling just once before he flopped onto his stomach. The impact blasted through his knees and his right temple as his head smacked the ground. The pain from his rib radiated through his chest, leaving him flapping his lips for air. His lids fluttered down, the appeal of blacking out calling to him, but voices from above sent a burning fist punching into his chest._

 _Turned around and dazed, Wallace threw himself onto his feet and ran. The trees and shrubs surrounding the mansion all looked the same, but the mansion's siding, the way the features and windows tapered off, told Wallace he'd picked the right direction._

 _Cutting through the air with his arms, Wallace sprinted past the front of the mansion, the sound of the front door opening drawing his attention for half a second. With nothing but the empty clearing ahead of him, Wallace glanced back in time to find the front door opening and Willow emerging from inside._

" _Wallace!" she cried out. "Run!"_

 _After a fleeting look ahead of him, ensuring his path hadn't become obstructed, Wallace looked back again, to find Chara on the front steps, dragging Willow by her hair to the side as the girl and her glaceon stepped outside._

" _Blizzard."_

 _Wallace ground his teeth as he pushed himself to run faster as the glaceon's cry filled the clearing. Like the first hint of winter, cold bites of air nipped at the back of Wallace's neck as he left the clearing and dove into the tree line._

 _The idea that the trees could conceal him kept Wallace going, leaping over tree roots and avoiding pitfalls as the encroaching chill brushed his arms and raised his flesh into bumps. Finding a path of desire ahead of him, Wallace followed a beaten trail in the forest, praying it would turn the hard soil under his feet into soft sand, as the bushes and grass on his sides began to turn white, dusted by winter's kiss as the forest sounds turned to static, tree branches and leaves becoming encased in ice as the glaceon's long reaching blizzard spread across the island._

 _As winter's coating passed Wallace, frosting the ground under him, causing his hurried steps to crunch with every footfall, Wallace watched the trees thin ahead of him and the golden sand of the beach spread out on the horizon of his vision._

 _Wallace burst from the tree line, a prisoner passing the bars of his cell and trampled down the beach, his legs splashing through the incoming tide that sucked his feet down, slowing him as the water swallowed his waist. As Wallace's feet dragged through the sloping shore, the water's chill that rivaled glaceon's blizzard encased his body in ice before he started to swim, a trying process as his natural reaction was to high tail it out of the water, but instead, Wallace pressed on._

 _At first he started slow, cutting his arms through the bay water and away from the island, but his slow progress seemed to be an invitation for an attack and so his nerves kicked in and his arms thrashed through the icy water that threatened to drag him under every time he slowed. With every violent swing his arms made through the water Wallace could feel his fingertips numbing, his lips tingling as puffs of his breath filled the air._

* * *

The sapphire blanket of water that lapped the shores of Shalour City's cove broke as a head of ash blond hair disturbed the surface. Pale limbs cut through the water, laggard, but moving with purpose as Wallace propelled himself across the sea.

The water moved in fluid and rhythmic waves that lapped over one another soundlessly as Wallace swam toward the shore. As the summer sun crested the Tower of Mastery, its rays turned the water to blue steel around him. With brown eyes like a predator, the bridge of his nose sliced through the water, parting the sea in front of him as his head bobbed, water streaming from his face.

A glint of sunlight caught a wash of blue scales beside him, Wallace's totodile's tail swished through the water, keeping Wink swimming in time with his trainer as other water-types swam alongside them. Pokémon three times as big as Wink swam below Wallace, but Wallace held form, his legs and arms moving in tandem as he neared the shining white sand beach. To his right, beside Wink the water broke, a curved snout prodding the surface as water glided over cerulean scales and spikes of red spines cleaved through the water. Two gleaming yellow-orange eyes emerged from the sea above a mouth lined with teeth made for tearing flesh.

As he neared the beach Wallace took in a lungful of air through his nostrils then made a slow dive, his dark eyes catching pokémon cowering near the bottom of the shore as the horde scaled pokémon dove behind him. Their presence acting as a deterrent to any wild pokémon that might have considered attacking.

Wallace folded his arms to his side and kicked, pushing himself further down until he touched the sandy bottom and pushed off. Kicking his way back to the surface he saw Wink thrashing in pursuit of a luvdisc, his jaws yawning wide open as he neared his prey.

Wallace broke the surface, feeling the water break above him and slide down his face as he walked up the shore. The feeling of water sluicing off his body and the sea pulling at his limbs was disheartening, the lingering grip of a dear friend inviting him to stay a little longer.

As he cleared the sea, Wallace watched Wink dart up the beach, jaws surprisingly empty of a luvdisc and head for a pair of beach towels spread on the sand. In a pair of blue trunks that contrasted his red towel, Andrew laid out under the Kalosian sun, arms folded behind his head as he stared at the sky, at least Wallace assumed so, a pair of sunglasses kept Andrew's true object of attention a mystery.

"Enjoy your swim with feraligatrs?" Andrew asked as Wallace crawled onto a blue towel under the shade of an umbrella where Wink had taken root.

"Yeah," Wallace said, propping himself against the umbrella pole that he tapped with his finger. On the underside of the umbrella spinarak sprung to life, untangling himself from the web of silk and spokes to descend onto Wallace's head. "Enjoy your skin cancer?"

Andrew plucked his glasses off and tossed Wallace a look as he sat up and nodded down the beach. Aside from the two of them, several other trainers were sunbathing while families played in the sand, but close to the water Wallace watched one of Pearce Production's employees, Jason Bahr, playing in the sand with a hippopotas and elgyem.

Wallace draped his arms over his knees as he watched hippopotas spew sand into the air that elgyem gathered with his psychic powers into standing columns that began to form impressive walls while Jason ran back and forth from the sea with a bucket of water for stabilizing the structure of their castle.

Wallace smiled, letting his mind replay similar moments in time he'd captured in his memories. He'd had a similar moment in Ambrette, gliding his hand across the glass tanks of the aquarium while Wink became fascinated with the different pokémon swimming freely inside. And again outside Geosenge as he and elgyem studied the stone pillars. His summer trekking across eastern Kalos had provided him with small snapshot moments in time when everything seemed, perfect.

"You're really going to give all this up?" Andrew asked, as if he could tell where Wallace's mind had wandered off to.

Looking away from Jason, Wallace found Andrew inspecting at the tops and undersides of his arms, apparently checking his tan coverage. "All this?" he asked, quiet, as he looked out over the sparkling blue waters surrounding Shalour City.

Andrew shrugged as he sighed and stared out to sea as well. "This life, a simple life, where no one is hunting you. If I were you I don't think anyone could pay me to go back to that school." Andrew's head turned, but his eyes lingered on the sea a moment longer before he fixed his eyes on Wallace. "You were kidnapped, held captive for four days."

"And I survived," Wallace said, cutting in as he often had to when Andrew decided to bring up his confinement by the Orphans.

"Which is more than enough reason to keep surviving," Andrew said, shrugging. "You don't walk through hell just to remember you left something behind and turn back around to go get it. Have you even been watching the news or reading the reports the University has been putting out? Nine months and they still have no clues on the Orphans. Nine months and nothing. These aren't people the authorities are capable of dealing with, that says enough."

"If you're worried about me just join me there," Wallace said.

"I can't," Andrew squinted as he averted his eyes and dug his fingers into the sand. "Arlette. I don't think I could handle being where she – I can't go there."

Wallace looked back to the castle building team, focusing on elgyem. He imagined that over time Arlette's relatives had cleared out her room on campus, meaning aside from the courtyard dedication, nothing physically would remain of the girl when he got back. But the elgyem she bred for Andrew remained. "I understand," he said. "Which is why I gave you the company, and you'll have Jason, so you won't be here alone. I mean, he's not me, but he'll fill the void I guess," Wallace said, grinning as he watched Jason stumble on another trip from the beach and his bucket of water go flying, splashing elgyem.

"Our friend is back," Andrew said as he slipped his glasses on and fell back on his towel. "I'm starting to think she likes the view."

Wallace looked past Andrew to find Detective Fujioka standing at the start of the beach, looking as out of place as anyone could. Wallace watched the detective fan herself, sweating under the summer sun from her poor choice in beach attire, thigh high socks, a skirt, and a draping shawl that covered her upper half. Wallace watched her fidget in the heat, swiping strands of her dark hair from her forehead.

"What does she want?" Andrew asked. "I'm tired of seeing her. She followed us from Lumiose all the way here."

"She's a friend." Wallace got to his feet, brushed his hands on his trunks, and headed up the beach to her. The closer he got the more the detective looked relieved as she walked away from the beach, toward the shade provided by the walls surrounding the Tower of Mastery. "You look uncomfortable," he said.

"It's hot, it's very hot out here," Minako said, swiping her forehead again.

"Maybe you should dress like you're coming to a beach then," Wallace said.

"I'm on duty, I can't be seen in a bikini," Minako huffed. "Anyway, I have an update for you, on Sonai Enterprises."

Wallace filled his lungs with an intake of air, bracing himself for whatever punch to the gut the detective would deliver about his father's rival company and their connection to the band of orphans they controlled.

"Good news first," Minako said, squinting against the sun. "They filed for bankruptcy again, the clients they snaked from your father seem to be leaving, this could mean good things for Pearce Productions. I thought you might be happy about that."

"That's good for Andrew," Wallace said, though the ups and downs of his father's company didn't concern him anymore. "Anything about the Orphans?"

Minako shook her head. "Not much, a lot of what we already knew. Sonai took it upon themselves to start funding outreach programs to aid undeveloped towns and regions in getting more children started in training. These handouts weren't free though, sometimes they returned to collect. Sometimes they took children under the pretense of a work-train program. In exchange for their services and money Sonai would employ children to work for them. Somehow through this program the Orphans were formed. Still no clue on how they were chosen, or by whom."

"Okay," Wallace said, licking his teeth, the lack of a break in the case leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

Minako held her hand out and began counting off on her fingers. "Chara, James, Willow, mystery boy, mystery girl, am I right?"

"James is dead," Wallace said bitterly, unable to brace himself for the sight of James' flattened lower-half flashing through his mind. His last words, sputtered cries for Wallace to check on his garchomp hissed through Wallace's ears.

"Right," Minako said, nonchalantly as she curled her middle finger in, only to stick it out again. "What about the girl with the glaceon? Is she the mystery girl?"

"I don't know," Wallace said. "The way Chara reacted to her, the way she commanded him, it was different than the others. Chara always seemed like the leader, but he was like a servant compared to her."

"So then Chara, Willow, mystery boy, mystery girl, and mystery leader?" Minako said. "Three individuals left in the dark. Are you about ready to head back to school?"

"Yeah, I'm packed, the school is expecting me, my travel arrangements are finalized," Wallace said. "No going back now."

"You're not going back to Lumiose before you leave?" Minako asked.

Wallace pursed his lips and shook his head. "My things are being sent over already. Andrew and I are going to walk to Coumarine and I'll catch a ride from there, I've been saying my goodbyes on the way."

"Goodbyes?"

"Andrew's mother, Jason, this whole trip has been like a goodbye to Andrew," Wallace said. "And I need to call Izumi."

Minako's feet dug into the stone as she turned and practically slapped her forehead. "Of course, I forgot, Izumi. We need to talk about him. If you want my continued support in tracking the Orphans and the discretion of the Kalos police to your past actions, Izumi can't be involved."

"What? What? Why?"

"By digging into Sonai I was trying to track their transactions, recent ones at least," Minako said. "Expecting I'd find a pattern, like another team of Orphans, but instead I found a large loan of money sent to Lumiose to pay a year's rent for an abandoned store in the city, I checked the address and it's the same space Izumi is conducting his forgery business out of."

The heat of the beach clicked up several notches to the point Wallace felt himself swiping sweat from his forehead as Minako spoke, parts of her explanation falling on deaf ears as Wallace tried to replay every conversation he'd had with Izumi. "Is he?"

"No," Minako cut in. "I don't think he's working for Sonai. I've been following him too, he doesn't do anything odd. He travels out of the city from a house in Ambrette to work at the Forgery. Even with wire taps inside I didn't pick up anything to hint that he might be working with them. Like I said, Sonai made it a point to provide aid to people, it's not a stretch to imagine Izumi needing funding and seeking them out. I think he spoke to someone at Sonai, was given the building, and probably equipment by them. I'm guessing that's how Sonai knew about you, as Wallace Peters that is. The computers Izumi uses in his office are all Sonai products, they have access to all his files."

"Are you sure that's it?" Wallace asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Minako nodded, her eyes stern and focused. "I did my homework on this, I wouldn't have waited to tell you if I thought he was a direct danger to us," Minako said. "But his connection to Sonai, on top of his illegal practices make him a noose around our necks. Cut him loose, or he's going to get us in trouble."

"I'll think of something," Wallace said.

* * *

After leaving the beach, Jason headed back to Lumiose while Wallace and Andrew made a trip back through Shalour, walking the curved stone paths of the tiered city with their sand dusted feet as they headed for the Pokémon Center. Following the opening of the automatic doors, a particularly shrill nurse's voice greeted them. "No shoes, no shirts, no services!"

Wallace wasted no time in arguing with the woman and threw his top on and stuffed his feet into his shoes while Andrew made a run for it, darting past the front desk and heading for the barracks to the back of the building. The nurse fired a withering look at him as he passed her, sheepishly following after his devious friend and earning odd stares from the trainers inside.

The moment Wallace rounded the corner into the barracks, a brown pokémon with a tuft of red fur standing tall between its ears let out a happy yawp and scampered to him. Smiling, Wallace dropped to give the squirming litleo a scratch on her stomach.

"I missed you today, we all did," Wallace said as he watched elgyem drift down from his shoulder and sit beside lilteo, running his hand down the pokémon's fur like Wallace showed him how.

Wink's claws scraped the floor as he scurried in between Wallace's legs to hiss at the litleo, only for the dual-type to swat playfully at him.

"Have fun at the beach?" a voice from the corner of the room asked. Antionette shifted up on the top bunk of a set of beds, a sneaker in her lap as she worked to lace it.

"Wallace went swimming with a group of feraligatrs, again," Andrew said as he dropped his swim trunks and redressed in front of the Kalos Champion.

"Fun?" Antionette asked, her brows drawing up.

"It was fun, and relaxing, they're not dangerous," Wallace said.

"The word feral is in their name, and it was only fun because you have Wink with you," Andrew reminded as he began to stuff clothes into a bag. "They'd turn me into pulled pork if I tried it."

"I finished your map," Antionette said, brandishing a folded sheet of paper. "It'll get to you Coumarine by tomorrow. Barring you don't make any more beach stops."

"We don't need a map!" Andrew said as he leaped up and snatched the paper from Antionette. He unfolded the paper and made a show of looking it over, turning the page in his hands several times. "I traveled Kalos on my own, I know this region like I built it."

"It's been over five years since you traveled Kalos and you are less than a year out of a repetitive coma, I think you should take the map," Antionette said as she finished lacing her shoe and slipped it on. Gathering up her stuff, Antionette tossed a small green cap onto her head before he squeezed Andrew's shoulder as she made her way to the exit. "If that's it I'll be off, being away from the League was nice, but they need me back."

"Of course," Wallace said, stepping aside. "Thanks for visiting and babysitting Mila for me."

"Not a problem!" Antionette said with a salute over her head as she departed.

* * *

After packing up their corner of the barracks the sun began to dip as Wallace and Andrew shrugged into their backpacks and left the Pokémon Center, to the head nurses's delight.

They wasted no time in heading for the road out of Shalour, hoping to make progress before the rain a television in the Center had warned about came, but spent minutes along the side of the road waving bye and chatting with some other visiting trainers they'd befriended. After wishing safe travels to a group of ten year olds, Wallace and Andrew faced the pathway that led into Route 12, but stopped as a round man crossing ahead of them started to run. Shoving and pushing a group of three children ahead of him, he snapped his neck in their direction and flapped his lips to the children who too cast looks in their direction.

"Sir!" Andrew called out, rushing forward.

Wallace cocked a brow up until he saw a Poké Ball bouncing on the path away from the man. Andrew swooped it up and jogged behind the man.

"Get away from us!" he shrieked.

What Wallace expected to be a simple return of a dropped item turned into the man yelling and shielding from the children from Andrew as if he'd offered them a greande "What's going on?" he asked, jogging to Andrew's side with Wink scuttling after him.

"I'm just returning your ball, sir," Andrew said, holding the ball in his direction. "Relax."

The man's eyes, a dark green, flicked to the ball before he looked back to Andrew and then to Wallace. "I don't want it, not from you, from either of you."

Wallace watched as the man's face lit up red to find elgyem casting a light at him, a low beeping starting in his chest. "Elgy, maybe you shouldn't – "

The man let out a high bawling sound as he turned back and hovered over his children, swooping them all under his arms and shuffling off the road and into the shadow of a building. "Stay away from us, heathens!"

"Who are you calling heathens?" Andrew demanded, trailing after the man.

"Wait, Andrew..." Wallace reached out for his friend, but his hand fell through the air as he became distracted by some of the other trainers. Many people had stopped their daily tasks to take part in watching the spectacle. "Andrew," Wallace said, his voice dying to a whisper as his eyes fell to the three young trainers they'd just spoken too, gathered in a huddle and covering their mouths as they cast glances their way.

The cries of the man were drowned out as Wallace tuned in to the voices of the trainers and visitors around him.

"Who are they?"

"Why is that man screaming like that, is he in trouble?"

"Isn't that?"

"That's Wallace Pearce!"

"He must be with Andrew, they've been on the news a lot this year, why are they here?"

"Elgy!"

A distorted warbling sound drew Wallace's attention behind him as something shattered on the stone pavement. On his blind side stood a woman with her hands held to her face and a shattered camera at her feet, Elgy's arms aimed in her direction.

"You broke my camera!" the woman yelled as she lowered her hands to her belt and pulled off an ultra ball.

"Andrew, let's go," Wallace said, rushing toward his friend who was still in the middle of trying to offer the man his dropped ball. Wallace slapped the Poké Ball from Andrew's hand and pulled him along. "Wink!"

"Totototo!" Wink rushed across the ground, hissing at people that ventured a step too far onto the path.

Despite Andrew's reluctance, Wallace shoved him into the stone gateway and straight through, not wanting to entertain the curious looks from the attendants inside who'd heard the commotion. On the following route Wallace let elgyem carry their bags over a small river that bled into the sea as he and Wink waded into the water and swam across, Andrew opting to do the same, his face twisted with lines of anger.

"You should have let me handle that," Andrew said as they pulled themselves up the opposite shore, grabbing his bag from elgyem. "I don't like being treated like some kind of, pariah."

"Yeah, that's not something you'd be used to," Wallace said as he looked ahead of them. Trees that filled the opposite shore had thinned out on the other side as a dirt road appeared on the path before them, winding across the route around and sometimes through patches of tall grass. To his left Wallace ran his hand along a handmade fence, thin columns of wood with odd shaped holes drilled through them that fit other sticks of wood. It wouldn't keep anything out, except maybe pokémon.

"It's a farm," Andrew said, coming to the fence and resting his hands on the wood. "Or was. It looks deserted."

Casting his eyes across the land behind the fence, Wallace had to agree. The fenced off area made the farmyard a box, with other smaller fences portioning the land into polygons. A barn, in need of a wood replacement and a paint job stood solemnly in the distance with the tongue of the Kalos flag flapping wickedly with the onset wind of a storm. Attached to the barn was small house, the front door missing and several windows along the front shattered or wide open.

The rain came quick. Though the smoky clouds rolled in slowly across the sky, the globs of rainfall pelted the boys from above, drenching them in the time it took to run across the farmland. Inside, rainwater dribbled from the roof and splattered the streaked linoleum of the entry before gravity pooled it in a sunken in section of the floor by the wall.

"This place is a dump," Andrew said with kick that sent an empty food can soaring across the room. "Has to be abandoned."

Wallace twitched his nose at the musty stench of the room. The carpet around the entry was stained black, possibly by foot traffic, but he noticed other stains that peppered the floor as Wink explored the room. A small brown couch, cluttered with newspapers and clothes sat against the left wall, the pile so out of control it spilled on the floor.

Crossing into the kitchen, Wallace followed a soft humming and dragged his finger along a countertop, his finger coming back with a hardy layer of dust and grime. A single light, from somewhere behind the house, shone into the kitchen, illuminating dark scuffs on the floor and curious stains under the windows. A silver pot sat on the stove, the lid sitting askew. Lifting it off, he found pasta that had congealed together in the pot. Picking up on his hunt for the humming, Wallace wandered to a large white refrigerator, the recognizable sound of a whirling motor confusing him.

He pulled on the door and was met with pale yellow light and the sight of a bare fridge aside from cans of alcohol and a black bag sitting far in the back. Balancing the door on his hip, Wallace reached in and pulled the bag forward, his fingers snaking through the opening until they touched something cold.

"Andrew," he said, gripping an object inside the bag that he pulled out, a smooth block of gold. Reaching back into the bag Wallace's hands passed over more blocks before he gripped a handful of what felt like marbles. Opening his hand under the light of the fridge, Wallace balanced at least a dozen small pearls on his palm. "Elgy, this stuff looks like it was hidden here," he said, his voice low.

"Elgy, el-el." Elgyem flashed his digits yellow, but then red and Wallace nodded in agreement.

After dumping the block and pearls back into the bag, Wallace wiped his hand on his damp pants and closed the door. "Andrew, I don't think this place is abandoned." Wallace rounded the corner of the living room and froze, alarmed by the presence of more than just Andrew in the living room.

"Hey." A tower of a man with a black hat and a bandana over the lower half of his face stood behind Andrew, one hand over his mouth and the other stroking the air at his side. The pair stood no more than ten feet away between Wallace and the front door.

The fluid movement of the man's fingers caught Wallace's attention as he realized he wasn't stroking the air, something was standing by his side. Following a dragging sound on the living room carpet, two crystalline eyes appeared in the dark, reflecting the light from the kitchen. An eerie inhuman smile that seemed to bleed through darkness spread wide and caused Wallace to tensed at the sticky wet sound of its cheeks sucking away from its teeth.

Refocusing his attention on the portion of the man's face Wallace could see he tried to take a guess at the man's age, older for sure by the growl of his voice, but he couldn't figure out if that mattered. Did the Orphans have an age cap?

"Sableye, say hi." A twanged voice said as a woman moved out from the darkness directly to Wallace's right. She was dressed in uniform to the man, black hat and bandana that concealed everything under the bridge of her nose, though a long blonde ponytail did hang down her back.

The sableye inched forward, its eldritch hand stroking the air as it clawed toward Wallace. "Ss'eyee," it hissed as its fingers twitched and seemed to move without correlation to one another.

A click followed by a flash of light blinded Wallace who threw his hands up to shield his eyes. "Ah! Who are you? What do you want?"

"Sableye, sugar, use shadow sneak," the woman said.

On the ground, Wallace watched the shadow cast by sableye in combination with the flashlight extend like a macabre painting on the floor until it connected with his shoes. What looked like millions of small extensions broke away from the main shadow, streaking across the floor.

A debilitating chill, like shards of ice scoring the flesh on his back, gripped Wallace stunning him in place as he felt the weight of elgyem on his shoulder grow heavier, before it vanished all together.

As fast as the chill took him it vanished and beads of sweat formed on his brow. Focusing on the floor he watched elgyem being carried off by shadows before he was held securely under the sableye's arm.

"Elgy!" Wallace rushed forward, but the woman's arm shooting out caught him in the throat, sending him sputtering and hacking to the floor. As the woman crossed in front of him Wallace saw the man kick at the back of Andrew's legs, bringing him to his knees before he shoved him to the floor and placed his knee in the middle of his back.

"Now, let's see what you've got on you," the woman said as she lifted a foot and pressed to the base of Wallace's throat.

Wallace gripped her foot, trying to throw her off balance, but her boot only pressed down harder as he struggled.

"Don't fight me, sugar," she said as she crouched and rummaged through his pockets, spilling spinarak and Mila's Poké Balls onto the floor. "No money?" she said. "How disappointing. These two might be a snack for sableye. Hey sugar, you know the legend right? You gaze hard enough to sableye's eyes and it'll steal your soul. Sounds like quite the experience, huh?"

Wallace gasped, violently shaking his head as he managed to slip his hand under the woman's boot, freeing his throat. Wheezing in a breath, Wallace yelled with as much strength as he could muster. "WINK!"

"What's a wink?" The man asked.

The sound of something barreling down the hall drew everyone's attention to the living room as Wink came thrashing into sight and launched himself at the man. Wallace watched with wide eyes as Wink's mouth yawned open, counting each of the totodile's teeth as they sunk into the crook of the man's arm.

The man in black yelped, falling off Andrew and rolling to his back, swinging his arm and sending Wink waving through the air like a flag.

"Ice fang!" Wallace yelled, giving the woman's foot another shove, using the moment of her distraction to throw her off balance.

The woman screamed as she pinwheeled back and slammed onto the floor as Andrew crawled across the living room and retrieved his bag.

"My arm! My arm! Get it off my arm!" the man screamed, flailing from side to side as the woman struggled to get to him.

Sableye stood clueless between the two rooms, its arm smothering elgyem before a ball opening lit up the room. Sableye turned and lowered its gaze to the floor as a dedenne darted into its path.

"Denny, play rough," Andrew said.

"Dede!" Denny chirped as it charged for sableye, leaping at the last minute and tackling the imp to the ground.

Wallace watched the three pokémon vanish under a blur of colors and before a glint of purple light broke out from the tangle of limbs and elgyem reappeared near the ceiling. "Elgy!" Wallace held his arms out as elgyem floated to him, burying his head into Wallace's neck. "You're not hurt are you?"

Elgyem shook his head before he turned and threw his arm out, all of his digits flashing before a beam of multicolored lights, like the tones of a rainbow melded into a ray, shot across the room, striking the woman in her side.

The woman gagged as she was lifted off the floor, her thin legs kicking frantically before she was propelled across the room and send slamming into the wall.

"Toto!"

A harsh sound from Wink brought Wallace's attention the man, standing now, without Wink on his arm. Instead, the water-type lied at his feet, unmoving. Wallace's eyes focused on the man's arm, hanging limp at his side.

"Stupid!" he yelled, lifting his foot over Wink.

"Denny, volt switch!"

Wallace watched Denny detach itself from sableye before electricity haloed its body and it charged at sableye. A ball of yellow light slammed into the imp, sending it into an adjacent wall. Denny bounced off the floor and flew to Andrew who had his hands out. Andrew caught the dedenne and hurled it across the room again, Denny flying toward the man, another ball of yellow light forming ahead of it that crashed into the man and Denny tumbled overhead.

Dropping to a crouch, Andrew scuttled toward the opposite wall and retrieved Denny and Wink then came to Wallace's side, giving the sableye as much attention as a doormat. Andrew's hand gripped Wallace's arms, then shoulder, then the back of his neck. "Are you okay? They came out of nowhere."

"Fine, I'm fine," he panted back. "In the fridge, there's a bag of nuggets and pearls."

"Then they're not..." Andrew's head whipped behind them and then back to the unmoving pair. "They're thieves. They're not Orphans?"

Wallace shook his head and leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, but then dropped into a crouch, gripping his forehead. In his ear he heard elgyem emitting soft beeps of concern while Wink nosed his leg and nipped at the string from his shoes. "I'm okay," he said, swallowing a ball of fear clogging his chest.

"We should call the police," Andrew said, dropping his bag to the floor beside Wallace, the sudden thud of the pack startling him. "Sorry," Andrew said as he dug around inside.

In the time it took Andrew to explain their location and situation to the authorities, Wallace gathered the thieves into a corner of the room, stripping off their hats and bandanas to satisfy his own curiosity that he did not in fact know them. Leaving elgyem and Wink in charge of watching them, he retired to a chair in the kitchen until the police arrived. He remained seated through giving his statement and watched from afar as they escorted the thieves, a married couple stealing from marts along the coastal area of Kalos, out.

"It's getting late," Wallace said from in front of the kitchen window. The light that illuminated the grime in the kitchen came from a single light post several yards behind the house, not even the moon seemed to be able to shed much light through the storm clouds. "Do you want to stay here, or head back to Shalour? Coumarine is a ways off," he said, glancing to Antionette's map spread on the table.

Andrew sat on the floor, playing with a length of rope he found to drag across the floor for his dedenne. "We don't have to do this," he said, dropping the rope on Denny's head, the dedenne looking confused and insulted at the same time.

"What does that mean?" Wallace asked.

"This trip," Andrew said. "I know you did it for me. You could have taken the Badlands to Coumarine, or flown, or had Elgy take you immediately. I don't know if this was some kind of trip to make up for lost time, but you don't owe me an adventure." Andrew used the wall to push himself off and dusted off his pants

Wallace shrugged, averting his eyes to elgyem and Wink eating berries off a stack of paper towels. "I just thought, since we never did get to go off together as kids. And I don't know what will happen while I'm away."

"As long as you come back alive it doesn't matter what happens," he said, one hand clapping on Wallace's back as he pulled him in for a hug. "Be stupid, be brave, just come back alive."

"Right," Wallace muttered into his best friend's shoulder before they began to part, but Wallace dug in and held Andrew in place. "I want to help," he whispered.

"What?"

"You asked if I was going to give this up, my old life. I am, but I never told you why," Wallace said, his eyes focused on a sliver of light cast onto the floor. "It's because I want to help. When I ran, I did it for myself. I made a new life for myself. I lied to protect myself. And somehow I made it through hell, but in the process on rejoining the world, I set it on fire by introducing the Orphans to the people who tried to help me at school. And there's no one I can blame for that, but myself. A boy, his name was Dirk, is dead because of them, because of me. A boy, his name is Nat, he's burned beyond belief and he lost a pokémon, because of them, because of me. Arlette is dead, because of me."

Wallace gasped at feeling Andrew's hands tightening on his shoulders as he held him at arm's length, his blue eyes darting in their sockets.

"What?" he asked. "No, she fell. Wallace."

"She fell," Wallace said, nodding as biting his lip as his eyes burned with the onset of tears. "But she never would have made it to the roof if it wasn't for me. She was the only one who knew it all, and the idea of that, that she knew everything, that she pieced it together so easily terrified me. So I made her feel small, and stupid, and like she was worthless and that you never loved her, that what she'd based her life around, finding the truth for you, was pointless. I drove her to the edge, and I pulled her back, but it wasn't enough."

Andrew's hands fell from Wallace's shoulder as he backed into the living room and walked the length of the carpet. Wallace watched, unable to speak as Andrew grabbed his pack and opened it, spilling out his supplies. "Get your bag open," Andrew said.

They spent the next several minutes working in silence, laying out their combined supplies and piling most of it back into Andrew's bag. Things Wallace wouldn't need at school like a tent and other camping supplies were stuffed alongside Andrew's supplies, while packaged for the pokémon was divided up.

Wallace held Wink in the crook of his arm, though the totodile had packed on much weight in the past nine months and just hung there, happily, as elgyem touched the back of Wallace's head. "In just a handful of months I managed to ruin numerous lives, just by being there," Wallace said, catching Andrew off guard who stood across the house, leaning by the windows, bars of moonlight crossing his face. "Imagine what I could do if I put my mind toward helping them, if I put half as much effort into other people as I put into myself, imagine what I could do. I'm going to stop the Orphans, it's stupid and it's brave. But it's what I'm going to do." Wallace offered Andrew a smile and a short wave before elgyem made a series of low beeps and his vision flooded with purple light.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Five

* * *

 _ **AN:**_ Annnd we're back.

 **Question of the Chapter #34:** What do you think Wallace's sophomore year at school will be like?


	36. A Murderer, a Whore, an Idiot

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Six - A Murderer, a Whore, an Idiot, and a Liar**

 _Unreal friendship may turn to real_  
 _But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

As if looking through glasses, the landmarks in Wallace's sight were tinged with purple. The sight made the main gates of the University appear as if Wallace had landed on a foreign planet, standing on the doorstep to an alien monarchy. Shone through by a distant sun the gasses on the planet turned the atmosphere mauve.

In seconds, the residual lights of elgyem's power evanesced and Wallace stood in front of the gates in true color, their iron curling into stark patterns against the lush green yards that sprawled across campus. Though the sky was clear blue, a pit of fear and uncertainty bubbled inside Wallace as he stepped under the overhang, passing under strips of iron bent and curled to spell out: RADIX UNIVERSITY.

"You could have dropped us off anywhere," Wallace said, realizing elgyem must have known how impactful their return to campus would be. "You put us at the entrance gates on purpose."

Elgyem drifted from his shoulder and twirled through the air, the digits on his hands flashing like strobes as he flew up the side of the library and back to the ground. "Elgyem! Elgyem!" The psychic-type flew to Wink, cradled in Wallace's arm and bopped the water-type on the nose and flew away, jabbing his arm toward the path ahead of them.

Wallace watched elgyem's buoyant movements and demeanor, finding it hard to remain in his sedated mindset as Elgy seemed so happy. "I guess this place is like your home, both of you," he said, squeezing Wink's belly and forcing a short buccal sound from the totodile. "Lead the way, we're in Rose-Absolute Hall this year, where... Don used to live," he said, the name sounding foreign to him. One he'd tried to push from his mind in the months away from campus, though separating himself from a name did nothing to prevent the images attached to the name from probing his mind at night.

Elgyem's digits flashed as he turned to the path and forged ahead. Wallace followed, his shoes hitting the stone walkway with weak footfalls, his body seeping with anticipation, pent-up energy, and anxiety. As he cleared the library and followed a path to the northwest his craven steps carried him past two boys tossing a ball back and forth across the length of a field and couples linked by the hand as well as random passerby's, some of who tossed glares in his direction.

Despite Wink's weight, Wallace curled his arm and cradled the totodile like an infant, having something to focus both his hands on making the walk a little easier as the air near Rose-Absolute Hall seemed to grow warmer, laden with scrutiny and disapproval as he passed families taking strolls through campus.

Wallace paused as elgyem stopped at a door at the back of the dorm hall and tried to force it open. Beside them, Wallace found himself standing in front of a tall white stone pillar. No wider than his own body, the pillar jutted into the air into a hollow circle from which four long protruding stones stuck out at diagonal angles. Two jagged crescent-like stones connected the protruding stones on the sides, leaving the top and bottom with gaps between the tips of the stones.

Behind the stone effigy was a building made from a combination of natural and man-made stone that sat on a foundation of white bricks. A set of stairs sat beside a zig-zag ramp that led to the front door like the cordoned-off section of an amusement part ride, indicating the waiting line for visitors. A deep blue sign attached to the face of the building read: Gracidea Religious Life Center.

"Can I help you?"

Wink hissed and as Wallace turned, the totodile started to squirm, wiggling free from Wallace's hold. Wink hit the ground and shimmied toward a pair of sneakers a few feet away on the path. Wallace found a boy, taller than him, in jeans, a jacket, with a grey beanie on his head backing away with rapid steps as Wink charged him.

"Hey! It's okay, Wink stop, he doesn't bite!" Wallace said, concerned as Wink seemed intent on chasing the boy away.

"Yes he does!" the boy yelled back as he darted into the grass below the Gracidea Center, dropping an armful of books in the process. "Shiba!"

A dark blur moved in the corner of Wallace's vision and when he focused on it he saw a large four-legged pokémon leap off the stone ledge surrounding the building's entrance and land between Wink and the cowering boy.

The average-sized pokémon stood in front of Wink, its head tipped to the ground as the grey fur that covered most of its body snarled over its lip, flashing rows of sharp teeth.

"A mightyena," Wallace breathed, taking note of licks of shaggy black fur on its back and limbs. He moved with slow steps down the path until he was behind Wink. He crouched to eye level with the mightyena as he stroked Wink's back. "It's okay, calm down."

Wink jerked at Wallace's touch, his mouth yawning open as a bellowing hiss came from his throat, not the least intimidated by the dark-type's presence.

"Call off that thing!" the boy yelled, flailing his arms through the air behind mightyena. The boy's eyes were wide, his tanned skin stretching as he made a series of frustrated expressions.

"Call yours off!" Wallace retorted.

"It came at me, Shiba is just protecting me from a threat!" the boy yelled back as he swiped the beanie off his head, unleashing a mound of black curls. "Put a leash on that thing."

As Wallace moved to grab Wink, elgyem tumbled into sight as if someone had sent him spinning through the air. Rather than float past, Elgy picked up speed as he neared the mightyena and came down over it, his head connecting with the dark-type's in a clack of skulls.

Wallace and the boy flinched at the mightyena's outcry, but the pain seemed to fade in an instant as it reared back and crunched at elgyem. Elgyem vanished out of the path of mightyena's jaws, reappearing on Wink's back, a move that had the mighyena's neck swiveling to locate its prey again.

"Do you want to battle or something?" the boy asked as he came charging away from the building, a Poké Ball in hand. "Since you're attacking people."

"Not at all," Wallace said, letting go of Wink and waving his hands in front of him. "Elgyem was backing up Wink, I'm not here for a fight."

The boy narrowed his eyes on Wallace as he tossed the ball to himself several times. "If you say so, but you really need to control that thing," he said, aiming a finger at Wink who promptly snapped at the air.

The mightyena growled back and the two seemed to be on the verge of going at it again until the sound of whistling, three notes in descending order, seemed to cause the mightyena's anger to vanish.

The high-pitched sound drew Wallace's attention to the steps of the Gracidea Center. to a boy emerging from the set of doors. Sunlight struck a coif of rich brown hair, licked blonde by bits of sunlight. From a distance, Wallace could see his strong jawline and facial muscles loosening after his whistle.

"Everything okay?" the boy asked. He moved from the doors and made light work of hopping over the stone partitions of the ramp, landing with ease until he was in the yard. "Sounds like there was some trouble going on."

"Reed," the boy with black curls said, his tone lighter and pleasant compared to how he addressed Wallace. "I'm sorry, we pulled you away from your work."

The boy with the jawline Wallace found his eyes glued to, Reed, clapped a hand on the boy's back and jostled him. "Not a problem," he said, offering the boy a smile. Reed turned his attention to Wallace, his head tipping to the side, a look of confusion causing his features to scrunch, highlighting a splatter of dark freckles across his nose. "I don't think I know you," Reed said, drawing out each word. "But you look familiar."

In the months following his leave from campus and his father's death, Wallace's seclusion in the townhouse had allowed his hair to grow out. That, combined with attempts to rid himself of the espresso brown dye job Azalea had done for him, left Wallace with a mane of thick wavy ashy blond hair that overlapped his hairline and tickled the tops of his ears. The glasses were back into the drawer where he'd found them, and he'd gotten used to wearing contacts again.

"I'm Wallace Pearce," he said, his name rolling off his tongue as smooth as a cactus ball. It'd taken numerous calls with the University to clear everything regarding the incorrect name they had on file for him. A flood of tuition papers and school information arrived at the townhouse in the following days, making Wallace Pearce officially a student.

Wallace watched the boy's head snap in his direction as his name set in, his eyes going wide again, but it was Reed's face that surprised him. The freckled bridge of the boy's nose crinkled as the corners of his mouth vanished into small dimples, his lips parting as he let out a small chuckle.

"Huh," Reed said, squinting at him. "Wallace Pearce... Well, it's nice to meet you. I'm Reed Whitfield, this is Julian," he said, extending a hand.

Wallace took Reed's hand, gasping as Reed's grip tightened around his hand for a firm shake.

"Grimoire, Julian Grimoire," Julian said, wiggling several of his fingers at Wallace, but not reaching for a handshake.

"An elgyem," Reed said, releasing Wallace's hand as he lowered himself to the ground and eyed the psychic-type.

Elgyem flashed his red lights in Reed's face, cowering on Wink's back, who hissed at Reed, a warning he'd gotten too close.

"Sorry, I just love them," Reed said. " I'm from Unova so I've got a fondness for any of my home pokémon. They're really strong, and smart, with lots of psychic power."

"Can't be that smart if it thought attacking Shiba was a good idea," Julian said, scratching between his mightyena's eyes.

"Yee-yee-yee," Shiba giggled, barring its fangs again.

Reed pat his knees and stood, gripping Julian's shoulder again. Wallace watched the fabric under Reed's hand wrinkle and Julian flinch under his grip.

"Let's not say anything hurtful," Reed said, smiling to Julian then looking to Wallace. "Wallace is a special guest on campus, something of a celebrity."

"I don't know about that," Wallace said without thought, a nervous laugh bubbling from his throat.

Reed's smile widened as his hand slid from Julian's shoulder. "Well, my friends will be excited to know you're back on campus. I should get back to work, I just wanted to come out and make sure everything was okay. Nice to meet you, Wallace. Julian, I'll see you tonight at the Bellerose Courtyard?"

"Roger dodger," Julian said with the snap of his fingers as Reed jogged away and up the steps, back into the Gracidea Center.

The sound of Arlette's dedication peaked Wallace's interest, was the school holding another ceremony for her? "What's going on at the Courtyard," he asked.

Julian's mouth spread into a wide smile as he turned to Wallace. "That's where I know you from, besides all over the news. I'd heard your name before, she mentioned it a few times."

"Who's she?"

"I've been holding ceremonies in Bellerose Courtyard, hoping to communicate with Arlette on the other side." Julian held his chin and tried to suppress a giggle. "She's has a lot to say, and she's not very happy with you, Wallace." Julian rubbed Shiba's ears and beckoned the mightyena to follow as he headed off down the path toward the library. "See ya."

Wink hissed at Julian's back and the trotting mightyena, but the thought of a séance in Arlette's memorial courtyard obsessed all of Wallace's thoughts. Was it possible to talk to ghosts? He'd passed men and women living on the streets of Lumiose who claimed similar talents, but with their tattered clothing and unwashed hair, hands hungrily raking the air for spare change, he'd never given their claims much thought. Turning, he watched Julian until he disappeared through the glass doors of the library, then he turned his attention to the front doors of the Gracidea Religious Center, thoughts of the two boys he'd just met, holding public séances, raging through his mind.

Something prodding the side of his head and knocked the thoughts of ghosts from his mind for a moment. Wallace found elgyem hovering over his shoulder, nudging him. "Gy?" he hummed, jabbing at the direction of the dorm hall. "Elgy?"

"Yeah, let's go," Wallace said, giving the library one last look.

* * *

Entering Rose-Absolute hall, an old standing brick and mortar building with dormer roofing, Wallace checked in with a high energy attendant and received a brass key with his name taped to the end. He followed a line of students, parents, and pokémon, all carrying boxes through the halls before they filed into rooms ahead of him. A pair of mankey darted up a flight of steps ahead of Wallace, each holding two pillows in their hands as they raced through the hall.

After finding room 212 several doors down on his left side of the second floor, Wallace turned his key uselessly in the knob, the door already unlocked, and pushed his way in.

The room was as he expected, off-white walls, reddish-brown tile, wooden closets and drawers built against the wall. Two metal framed beds sat across the room from each other with two wooden desks and chairs against the wall between them. The side opposite him was vacant. A pile of his luggage sitting beside his bed was the only indicator someone might live on that side, but the side with the door was a mash-up of colors and fabrics, all ranging from the hottest of pinks to the most saturated of blues.

Venturing through the room, Wallace's shoes moved over a plush blue rug that looked like it'd laid out to purposefully cover the side of the room that wouldn't be his. Wink clawed at a spot in the carpet until he was satisfied with scratching and he darted under the vacant bed and started to hiss.

"You miss your pool, Wink?" Wallace asked, looking over the room's size. It was hard to tell, but he had to guess it was a little bigger than his last room, plenty of room for Wink to have another plastic pool.

Daring to explore, Wallace picked up a few items, perfume bottles from the desk that wasn't his to ensure himself that there was in fact a desk underneath the clutter and chaos of hair accessories, bracelets, and articles of clothing he didn't have the first idea of how someone put on their body.

Starting above the desk and lining the wall all the way to the door were posters of musicians caught in the middle of a performance when strobe lights turned their skin greens and blues. A string of white bulb lights hung above the posters, casting each of them with their own individuals light.

Inching closer to the bed, draped in tones of pink bedding, Wallace hovered over a large sweatshirt with jagged cut marks around the neckline, as if someone had scissored off the top. In the middle of the sweatshirt he read: **YOUR DAD CALLS ME NICK** **i** , ironed on in a simple cursive blue font.

"Gyy?" Elgyem beeped, flashing red lights at the sweatshirt.

"Who would wear this?" Wallace asked as someone slid through his doorway.

"Not you, ever, so keep your paws off my stuff."

Wallace's hand snapped back from the sweatshirt, dropping it in a pile on the bed as he craned his neck to the door. A boy stood in the doorway in a sweatshirt, cut to show both shoulders as well as everything below his chest. Two chains dangled from beneath the sweatshirt, lacing across his taut stomach and dipping off into the waistline of a pair of jean shorts.

"Got a good look?" The boy snatched a lump of cotton candy from a paper cone in his hand and flicked it into his mouth as he turned and started to sway his hips. "Good, ugh, so glad you're back, I couldn't stay in here a minute longer, I'm Nicki, B-T-W, Bonheur. I've got other names, but like my shirt said, your dad calls me Nicki." Nicki sashayed across the room and paused in the center, eyeing Wallace's luggage.

"Are you – " Wallace started, only to find himself cut off as he became distracted by Nicki's hair, slick and laid down strands of pink and blue fell around Nicki's face, accenting their features.

"Gender-fluid, yes," Nicki said. "Respect it, or we will have a problem. I'm sweet, but not sweet like this cotton candy," Nicki said, their eyes roving in their sockets, their mouth curling into a smile. "I'm more like sugar venom. So, is this going to be a problem? Cause I don't need another school year of drama from another small minded boy. I will ruin you, fair warning."

Wallace swallowed, hard, as he watched Nicki ready themselves with a fist clenched at their hip, the other looking ready to hurl the cotton candy at him. Elgyem flashed yellow lights at the side of Wallace's head, then at Nicki, beeping with uncertainty. "I was just going to ask if you were my roommate," he said..

Nicki's eyes, an eerie acid green, narrowed on him before they popped open and Nicki spun back to face Wallace's luggage. "Obviously," they said, aiming their cotton candy at Wallace's luggage. "Now, can we talk about the real issue here. This box is moving."

"Moving?" he asked, coming to Nicki's side and following the cotton candy to a large cardboard box nestled in with the rest of his luggage. "That's not mine, all my stuff fit in the luggage bags." Wallace looked over the half dozen rolling suitcases stacked in front of him.

"Got your name on it, honey," Nicki said, waving off the situation and moved back to their side of the room.

Elgyem drifted toward the box and scooted it out from the others, isolating it in the middle of the floor, his lights flashing over each side. "Elgy," he said, shrugging his shoulders as he tapped the top of the box.

His action caused a thud from inside as something nudged the top of the box hard enough to almost break the tape line.

"It's alive?" Nicki asked. "Oh wow, I thought it was some kind of toy. Well, there's no holes in that box, it's probably gonna die soon, whatever it is. That thing was moving earlier and I was not about to sit in here, alone, with whatever was inside."

"Elgyem, can you open it?" Wallace asked, grabbing the box by the corners as elgyem hovered over. He watched elgyem's hands flash as the end of the tape line peeled back.

The tape peeled past the center and a sleek and long pokémon sprung out of the dark box and struck Wallace like a bullet. He had enough time to back away, lessening the impact, but the hit sent him falling back to the floor, head connecting to the leg of his desk chair.

Wallace rolled to his stomach and tried to scurry away from whatever had attacked him as he heard Nicki scream and he came face to face with the amethyst scales and eyes the color of sitrus berries. A rattling sound filled the room as the ekans' mouth opened, lines of saliva connecting from the roof of its mouth as it hissed at him.

"I'm shook, why did you pack an ekans in a box?!" Nicki barked from their place on the corner of the bed, reaching out for the doorknob.

"It's not mine!" Wallace inched back on the ground as he watched the coils of ekans' body come undone as it crawled toward him, only for its mouth to come snapping shut. Wallace watched ekans' eyes lock onto something else as it turned its body to the side, or rather, lunged to the side.

The ekans began to struggle, its body slithering toward Nicki's bed, but it seemed unable to gain purchase on the tile as it was continuously dragged toward the box it came from. Looking back Wallace found elgyem hovering above the box before he kicked it onto its side, his hands stretched toward the ekans as he guided it toward the box with his powers.

Ekans made a lunge in Wallace's direction, but missed, its head striking out into the empty air as Wallace backed up against Nicki's bed. After what felt like several grueling minutes elgyem forced the ekans back into its box and folded the flaps over and tipped the box over on its top.

"That was terrifying," Nicki gasped. "I'm clutching my pearls."

"Thanks for your help," Wallace breathed, crawling across the floor to elgyem who draped himself over the top of Wallace's head. "Thank you, Elgy."

"What was I supposed to do? Get swallowed whole?" Nicki snapped with the groan of bed springs as they hopped off and stomped around the room and stopped beside the box. "Snake."

"What did you call me?" Wallace asked, peering at Nicki through the strands of his hair.

"Please, if I wanted to insult you I'd do better than calling you a snake, that's what the box says," Nicki waved off Wallace's momentary defensiveness as they kicked the box, only for it to rattle and send them scurrying back onto their bed. "Is someone calling you a snake?"

Wallace slid across the floor and turned the box until the word SNAKE faced him with thick black marker lines. His eyes darted to the space elgyem pulled the box from, stuffed in with the rest of his luggage as if someone stuck it there to camouflage with the rest of his things. "Did you see who dropped my stuff off?"

"No, I moved in this morning, it had to be while I was at breakfast," Nicki said. "I was gone for about an hour and when I got back all of that was there, but nothing unpacked. Is that really not yours? Did something leave a snake to attack you? Oh my god, wait..."

Wallace studied the box as Nicki fell onto silence, aside from the word written across the bottom there were no other markings on the cardboard, nothing to distinguish it or tell where it came from. Someone assigned to dropping his stuff off had his name and a key to his room and could have easily broken down a box and stuffed the pokémon inside.

"Who is Wallace Pearce?"

Wallace whipped around to find Nicki speaking into their phone, their smile widening. "What are you doing?"

Nicki's smile turned frightening as they looked at their phone, their venom eyes flicking in his direction. "Oh my god, I was right! I wasn't going to say anything, because I didn't want to be wrong and look stupid, but I knew it, I knew it! You're Wallace Pearce, I almost didn't recognize you, you changed your hair, I approve," Nicki said as they turned the phone around and an old picture of Wallace came on screen.

The photo was prior to he and Andrew leaving for their trip. Someone caught Wallace crossing the street in Lumiose, elgyem floating over his head like a storm cloud as Mila walked at his feet.

"No wonder they're calling you a snake, oh wow, this is juicy," Nicki slid to the edge of their bed and crossed their legs, nibbling at the top of their cotton candy mound. "I should be so lucky to have you as my roommate, this is either social suicide or my ticket to the top, depending on how I play this."

"Play what?" Wallace asked, getting to his feet.

"Play you, of course," Nicki giggled. "I can be your friend and defend you, elevating myself to almost a saint-like place by befriending Wallace Pearce. Once Kalos' heir and now probably the most hated boy in the region. Or I can be a little sexy spy, giving people all the tea on what you do, how you sleep, what you eat, and preying on their dislike of you for my own good. Oh, this is good, this is so good!"

Wallace stood in silence as Nicki rattled on about their options, eventually dissolving into a fit of giggles that shook their entire body. For a second Wallace could have sworn he saw two pieces of Nicki's hair stand up like horns.

Time bled away in the dorm room as Nicki removed a pair of contacts and replaced them with a new unnatural shade and wash their face. When they returned they revealed a chest of makeup to prepare what they called an 'evening look' while Wallace unpacked.

As he finished filing his drawers with socks and underwear, Nicki jolted out of bed and clapped their hands, startling Wink who emerged from under the bed and hissed.

"Okay, first night together on campus as roomies, so we need to start plotting now," Nicki said, talking to the ceiling.

"Plotting what?" Wallace asked, his voice a croak from maintaining silence for an hour following Nicki's conundrum of how to use him for their advantage.

"What kind of year we're about to have," Nicki said. "Only losers stay in during the first weekend on campus. There's the annual bonfire tonight, I hear there's going to be a hypnotist in the Performance Maison, probably a bunch of parties, maybe some battles in the stadium, pick one. Except the hypnotist. Can you say lame? My highlight is on and I'm ready to be the center of someone's attention, not lost in an auditorium crowd."

"What's a highlight?" Wallace asked as he dumped handfuls of trainer supplies into the spare drawers. Miniaturized ultra balls clattered against the hollow wood before he packed medicine over them and then stuffed a case of technical machines inside. "Also, do you really think I want to go anywhere with you?" he asked, slamming the drawer shut. "My life isn't a means to an end for you, or anyone, to take advantage of. Leave me out of whatever plan for popularity you have."

Nicki folded their arms over their chest, lips puckered before they paced the room and stopped beside the dresser. "First of all. I don't need a plan for popularity, I've got that already, trust that you've never seen one like me before, but lemme give you a for instance," they said. "Those things I mentioned earlier, using you, only appeal to me if you make that the more rewarding option. I heard how you attacked your last roommate, how some freaks from the safari wanted your head on a plate. I did some research and no student has ever died on or around campus in over fifty years, then two students die when you get here. You're dangerous and me just living in this room feels like a death sentence, so should you make this year a nightmare for me, I'll do the same. Likewise, if you make this year easy breezy booty-squeezy, I can do the same."

Wallace cocked a brow at Nicki, considering the biological possibility that Nicki's ears simply didn't hear the things their mouth said, when Nicki leaned over and grabbed his face.

"I've got a motto: When you're good to Nicki, Nicki's good to you." they said, squeezing his face before letting go and heading to the door. "So let's go, we've got an entrance to make."

* * *

Leaving his dorm, Wallace followed a strutting Nicki across campus toward Vetiver Lawn, a stretch of grass between upperclass dorms, the Student Union, and an administrative building. Ahead of them Wallace saw students heading in the opposite direction, passing the fountains and heading into the Performance Maison, a sign post advertising a hypnotist performing throughout the night in contrast to the bonfire.

"Cheer up," Nicki said, sensing Wallace's apprehension from his laggard walk behind them. "Tonight is the start of your sophomore career, nothing wows more than a comeback."

"You know who I am, but you do know what last year was like for me?" Wallace asked. "I lied, to everyone, everyday. That's not something people are going to forget because I try and play nice."

"No, but people feel sorry for you," Nicki said, twirling as they walked and flashing Wallace a smile. "You lost your dad, that's sad. You were assaulted, that's really sad. You recovered marvelously by the way. I think you'll find people are more forgiving than you give them credit for."

As they drew nearer to the chatter of students and the crackling of fire Wallace jostled elgyem in his arms. "This is kind of like your birthday, Elgy. Your egg cracked here at the bonfire last year, or I guess, I cracked it."

"Gy, gy!" Elgyem's hands flashed green as he flew from Wallace's arms and circled him, his digits leaving trails of light in his wake.

"Ooh, happy birthday little blue man," Nicki said as they left the stone path and crossed into the soft dark grass of Vetiver Lawn.

Wallace followed, silent, behind Nicki they passed clusters of students as they neared the roaring bonfire. By the fire, Wallace could make out the shapes of several timburr, all running back and forth from the fire in teams as they dumped logs into the blaze.

"I need to socialize, hang here for a minute," Nicki said, pressing onto Wallace's shoulder as if to root him in place as they trotted off.

Glancing around, Wallace ran back through his memory to last year's bonfire and notched in notes of how different everything seemed. There were no families sprawled out on blankets on the grass and no speakers stationed to pump out music. The fire was as impressive as he could remember, though it seemed like an afterthought as he found himself being the only one standing in its glow.

As his eyes wandered from the fire to the pairs of students wandering around something struck his shoulder and sent elgyem tumbling toward the ground. "Hey," he barked, whipping around to find a striking face glaring back at him as they passed. "Neo."

The boy's face and his hair, sweeping wings of light and dark brown hair brushed back on the sides of his head, were lit by the screen of his tablet as Neo moved into the shadows beyond the fire's light, leaving Wallace unsure of how to act.

As he watched Neo's back vanish between parties of people gathered beyond the reach of the flame's light he found himself eyeing the packs. He locked eyes with someone who shot him back a dirty look that sent his focus spinning back to the dancing flames.

Beginning a staring contest with the fire was all Wallace could do to keep his eyes from roaming to the crowds around him. The heat of stares burned into his back as he fidgeted with Mila's Poké Ball in his palm until elgyem came back up from the ground and pointed past the fire.

Daring to lift his eyes, Wallace focused to avoid eye contact with anyone as he found a large stage set-up at the end of a stone patio. A young-looking girl with black hair that fell down her back to her waist crouched beside a snivy. Wallace watched as she stood and came to the edge of the stage and stood in front of a microphone stand.

"If you wouldn't mind, Ivy and I have a show for you all," she said, speaking to the small crowds across the lawn. "My name is Alina Verdue and this is a contest spectacular performance!"

A weak wave of applause started to the left of Wallace, but died before it gained any momentum, but the girl did a curtesy anyway as her snivy stepped up.

"Energy ball to the stars!" Alina said, aiming a finger to the sky as her snivy gathered a messy green glob of light in front of its mouth.

Prior the ball becoming fully formed, the snivy fired it over the crowd and followed it with several more. Expecting the balls to drop on them, students scattered from where the energy balls hung in the air as snivy began to fire off more. In a matter of minutes the air above the field filled with in an eerie green glow as the firelight reflected off the energy balls.

"Now break 'em," Alina said, snapping her fingers in succession at the sky.

Wallace watched vines emerge from behind snivy, but couldn't follow them through the darkness as they disappeared over the crowd. But seconds later several energy balls shattered open with crackling pops, not unlike the sounds of the bonfire. In half the time it took for Alina and snivy to create the sky of green orbs, they all shattered.

One by one the green orbs winked out of sight and exploded with a burst of emerald green light above the field. Glaucous sparkles showered the field, bringing everyone's attention to the sky as students began to hurry toward the shimmering flecks of light, bathing in them.

Wallace watched elgyem flash his lights on the sparkles, turning them red and yellow as he twirled between them, beeping with glee.

A hand fell onto Wallace's shoulder, gripping him, and in the instant his mind launched him into a place of panic, thinking Neo had come back. In a fumble, Wallace grabbed the wrist with the plan of twisting it back, but instead turned it toward him, failing to inflict any kind of pain on whoever had grabbed him. Instead, he heard a sharp intake of air as someone shoved him from the back and he staggered toward into a spinning elgyem.

"What's your problem, I just wanted to take a picture?"

Wallace regained his balance and turned to find Kolton standing in his spot, a small dedenne puffing angrily at his feet. "Kolton," he breathed. The redheaded photographer looked about as pleased to see Wallace as Wallace had been to see the ekans that attacked him. Judging by his clothes, a pair of grey shorts and a button up, Wallace knew the coordinator hadn't taken the stage for the bonfire.

"Oh, it's you," Kolton said, his hazel eyes glimmering in the firelight. He lowered his camera, letting it hang at his side as he took on something of a defensive posture. "Did you think changing your hair was going to make us forget about you? Or do you think we're all still that stupid that we'd fall for another disguise?"

"Neither," Wallace said, studying the grass at his feet as he felt Kolton's scrutinizing eyes surveying his face.

"Actually," Kolton said, swinging his camera in front of his face. He gripped the zoom scope and aimed it at Wallace. "Maybe I should take one, for references. I still have the one I took last year, never know when ocular proof might come in handy."

Wallace winced at the camera lens, unsure if he wanted to let the picture happen or if he should turn away. But the choice was taken away from him as a warbling sound overpowered the crackling pop of the fire and Kolton's camera went tumbling to the ground, smashing into four different pieces on the grass.

Wallace glanced to his shoulder to find elgyem's arm outstretched, the lights dying on his hands as he realized that must be his newest obsession, knocking cameras out of people's hands. "Thanks," he whispered.

"Your pokémon are just as psycho as you are!" Kolton snapped, crouching as he gathered up the broken piece of equipment. "You're not welcome here, just thought you should know that, no one wants you here."

"That's not true."

A familiar voice soothed Wallace and allowed him to feel as ease as another hand landed on his shoulder. Eleanor appeared by his side, pressing some of her weight into him as she watched Kolton hold his broken camera to his chest.

Few things had changed about the girl since they last saw each other. Her hair was longer, the blonde highlights reaching further out from her scalp while her signature grey hoodie lacked sleeves.

"Every Radix student is welcome on campus, Kolton, you shouldn't go around making people feel like they don't belong," Eleanor said. "We're a family here."

"Freaks," Kolton muttered over his shoulder as his stormed away, his dedenne bouncing through the grass after him.

Before Wallace could breathe a sigh of relief at Kolton's retreat, Eleanor turned on him practically tackled him to the ground in a hug. "I'm so glad you're back!" she screamed too close to his ear. "You look good!"

"T-Thank you," Wallace muttered into her shoulder as he struggled to hold them both up. "And thanks for coming to my rescue."

"Anytime!" Eleanor beamed, stepping back as her hands slid down Wallace's arms and took his hands. "Is this it?" she asked, turning over Wallace's hand with Mila's Poké Ball cupped inside.

Without waiting for an answer, Eleanor snatched the ball, enlarged it, and dropped it to the grass. The burst of light was minor compared to the bonfire, but Mila the litleo made a grand entrance by puffing fire as she stretched out.

"She's so small!" Eleanor cried as she fell to the grass beside Mila and scooped the surprised litleo into her arms. "Oooh, she's so soft, and so small, and so cute! Hi!" she squealed as she pulled Mila to her chest and twisted side to side, rocking Mila like a baby.

Mila purred and swatted at Eleanor's face, occasionally nipping at strands of the girl's hair that came too close to her mouth.

"To think Krakaota helped me something so small," Eleanor said, nuzzling her face to Mila's, earning herself a lick against her forehead. "I was so happy when you called and wanted my help breeding."

A fear of saying the wrong thing, or letting the overflow of emotions spill out sealed his lips together and stifled his voice. Instead, he managed a laugh as he eased himself down onto the grass with her.

Eleanor opened her arms and let Mila roll out. The litleo's tail flicked Eleanor as she lumbered toward Wallace and collapsed with a groan into his lap, biting at his shirt. "How are you?" she asked. "Really? How was your first day back?"

Wallace met the girl's eyes, big and blue behind black rimmed glasses and saw every question she wanted to ask instead. "I'm okay," he said, settling for only answering what she directly asked him. "I've almost been in two fights. My roommate is, interesting. I found an ekans in my room," he said, watching Eleanor's face light up with shock. "Apparently I'm a snake."

"I'm so sorry," Eleanor said as her hand came out and clamped over his knuckles. "Where are you staying? What dorm?"

"Rose-Absolute," he said, scratching under Mila's chin as Eleanor's hand tightened over his.

"Me too!" she shouted. "I'm a resident advisor now, I quit my guide job. I can't bring myself to keep going to the safari, I thought this would be safer. This is so good, my room is on the third floor, you can come by anytime you want! I mean it, don't make me find your room and force you to hang out with me," she said as she rubbed Mila's belly quickly before the litleo could paw her hand. "Especially when you have my arcanine's child with you. This makes me like a fairy godmother or something," she said as she got to her feet and flicked blades of grass from her knees. "Maybe, fiery godmother, get it, cause it's a fire type?"

Wallace forced a hard smile and tried to hold back the wrong kind of laughter. "Yeah, or something like that."

"Okay, that was lame, but I tried," Eleanor said as she scanned the field. "It's so quiet compared to last year, it's a little sad. I figured the bonfires were would get bigger and bigger every year."

"Campus seemed quieter when I got here too," Wallace said, letting Mila slide from his lap as he got to his feet, pretending to look over the lawn with Eleanor, though he hoped he didn't lock eyes with anyone else.

Despite the heat of the fire, Eleanor tucked her hands into the side openings of her hoodie where her missing sleeves used to be, managing to look like some kind of featherless bird. "It's like something is lingering around campus, it's sucking all the fun and energy out of the move-in weekend. I've been here for a week getting ready and when parents started coming in with their kids it was like, reluctance, like they didn't want to leave their kids here anymore. Some of the first years were excited, but some were freaked."

"Really?" Wallace asked. "Because of the safari?"

"Partly," she said, tossing a look over her shoulder. Beside the lawn sat a lot for campus vehicles, but beyond that sat the ICO, the first year dormitory and the site of Arlette's fall to her death. "People are saying the ICO is haunted now and it only gets worse from there. The Courtyard is haunted, the building is haunted, the hall where Arlette lived is cursed, the room she stayed in still has her spirit lingering inside. Arlette was born on October 25th and if you go to the roof at 10:25 pm you'll find her ghost waiting to challenge you to a battle." Eleanor's voice died away as she dropped her head to her chest and sighed. "I've heard every dumb rumor you can imagine in this past week and I'm losing my mind dealing with these freshman, glad I don't live in that building."

Wallace's eyes slid from Eleanor's freckles to the worn tops of her sneakers, mind whirling with thoughts of Arlette, séances, and his part to play in the gloom that encompassed campus.

"I'm sorry," Eleanor said, coming back to life as her head snapped up and her arms came shooting out from her jacket to dab at her eyes. "I shouldn't say anything. Arlette hardly had anyone in her life and here I am complaining about her memory."

Elgyem flashed green in Wallace's eyes, blinding him for a moment, but when the throbbing green globs in his eyes faded, Wallace saw elgyem touching his hands to his chest. "Gy, gy, gy, em..."

"Arlette is the reason I have elgyem," he said.

"What?" Eleanor asked, her eyes moving between Wallace to the psychic-type.

"Andrew asked her to breed an elgyem he found," he said. "He was going to give me the egg as a gift, but then everything happened. I ending up going to his house and finding it, his father let me take it. I didn't find out until after she was gone. I'll never get to thank her for that, but it's like she's still here because of him."

"Elgy Bellerose, how about that?" Eleanor's distraught face broke into a smile as she reached out and touched hands with elgyem.

Elgyem's hands flashed as he started to beep happily and floated to Eleanor, his arms encasing her head as he hugged her face.

The sight of Eleanor rubbing elgyem's back almost brought Wallace to tears until something struck his back. Annoyed at the occurrence, he whirled around and found Neo passing him, coming to Eleanor's side. "Oops," the brunet boy said.

"Oops?" Wallace asked as Neo pecked a kiss onto Eleanor's cheek. "Oops, that's all you have to say?"

"Is there something else I should say to you?" Neo asked, propping an elbow onto Eleanor's shoulder, making Wallace's eyes flick to the girl who looked immediately uncomfortable to be a witness.

Elgyem pried himself away from Eleanor and back to Wallace, his digits flashing yellow at Neo, before they turned red. "Em, em, elgyem," he said, his beeping lowering into something harsh and threatening.

"Forget it," Wallace said, letting his eyes roll away from Neo. "I don't know what I was thinking, bye Ellie," he said, turning from the couple and wiggling his fingers for Mila to follow him.

"Yeah, I've been wondering that too," Neo said, his voice raising to be heard as Wallace started to retreat.

Wallace planted a foot ahead of him, but rather than continue walking he pivoted back to Neo who had turned his attention to his tablet. Mila paused at Wallace's side and took to rubbing against his calves, lacing her body between his legs. "What?"

"Someone texted me earlier, saying they saw you checking in," Neo said, flicking his tablet's screen. "That was two hours ago. Since then I've been racking my brain trying to find a reason you'd be stupid enough to come back."

"Why do you need a reason?" Wallace asked.

"You leave and are outed as Arlan Pearce's son and he's named as the prime suspect in Andrew's disappearance only to turn up dead days later, real convenient for you, as you and Andrew make a public appearance as best friends forever." Neo said, taking small steps forward, his eyes narrowed into slits behind his glasses. "Then the news about your father stealing money is confirmed, but it's fine because you've made a promise to refund everyone and restore the company's good name. So, in the end, you escape punishment again."

"And?" Wallace asked, his voice trembling on the verge of breaking, in anger or fear, he couldn't tell.

"And so now what?" Neo asked, his shoulders jumping in a shrug as he stepped ahead of Eleanor. "Pearce Productions has to be yours by now, you got your friend back, your name is cleared, what could you possibly want from this school? Oh, no wait, I got it." Neo's face lit up by fireside as he waggled his finger in the air at Wallace. "It's Azalea, right? You came back for her? Or no, wait, is it Tempest, I remember you had a crush on her, but wait..." Neo paused, dramatically turning his eyes to the ground as he held his chin. "They weren't the ones," he said, his eyes crawling back to Wallace. "I got it, it's Don. I wonder where he's at tonight." Neo licked his lips, an effort to contain a smile as he narrowed his eyes and leaned in closer, whispering. "Or is it all of them? Were you screwing all of them?"

Shooting pricks of pain tore through Wallace's palms as he balled his fists, behind Neo he saw Eleanor's head looking in every direction as if searching for an escape, but as he followed her lead he knew that an escape wasn't saw she wanted. The small packs of students around the lawn had gathered closer, their bodies tilted and heads turned in his direction to pick up every word exchanged between him and Neo. "Neo – "

"Get mad," Neo said curtly. "Show me who you really are. All I could think about after you left and everything came to light was all the signs I missed. How nothing about you really seemed right. No way would someone with as little knowledge as you make it past the application stage, but you did, because you're rich. But I think I wanted to ignore it for the sake of being your friend, but I know now that's impossible. You don't have friends, you'll never have them, because you use people." With slow strides Neo crossed the grass and bumped Wallace again. "You're just like your dad, using people for your own benefit. That's really why you're here," he whispered.

A snap in the back of Wallace's mind had his body moving without thought. He leaned into Neo's shoulder, applying enough force to knock the boy off balance, his arms spinning as he teetered near the fire. Wallace heard the gasps of on-lookers, Eleanor included, as he reached out and grabbed Neo's forearm, yanking the boy up until they were face to face.

"You should really be more careful," he announced to those listening before he lowered his voice as he moved in closer, able to focus on the individual ridges of Neo's eyes at their proximity. "A murderer, a whore, an idiot, and a liar. Those are the things you just called me. I'm not proud of what I've done, but I didn't come back expecting forgiveness or understanding, nor do I want it and if I did it wouldn't be from you. So my reason for being here, as well as what happened to my father, the status of his company, and who I do or do not screw, is none of your damn concern." Wallace snatched his hand away from Neo before he backed away and brushed off his shoulder. "You shouldn't play around when you're near a fire, Neo, you could get hurt," he said, again, loud enough to be heard across the field, though his voice lingered on the precipice of dying out, his bravado plummeting.

Unable to calm his breathing, or handle the eyes boring into him, Wallace turned and started walking in a random direction. Eventually he knew his feet would leave grass and touch stone, he'd worry about finding his way back to his dorm when the heat of the bonfire and everyone's eyes weren't on him.

Just yards away from the fire a chorus of gasps stopped Wallace as something soared over his head and landed in the grass in his path. Mila ran for it, bouncing across the grass in search of a possible toy and Wallace followed. He stopped a few feet away as he watched Mila swatting at a Poké Ball. His breath caught in his throat as he grabbed Mila and lunged back as the ball broke open on the field.

Expecting something terrifying to emerge, he was slightly taken aback as a yellow and purple bodied pokémon appeared on the lawn, startling the students. Tufts of blue fur stuck up behind the pokémon as small streaks of electricity roamed its body. Two large blue eyes glowed in the shadows outside the bonfire range and as the pokémon progressed on Wallace he could make out four smaller eyes focused on him.

Wallace heard Neo call something out and he did the same, throwing his hand off to the side. "Elgyem, move!"

The smell of static filled the air as elgyem took a minute to survey Wallace, alarmed at the panic in his voice before he glided to the right. Tightening his grip on Mila, hairs along Wallace's arms raised with a tingle of charged particles that grazed his skin as a bolt of lightning struck the ground. The flash of light blinded Wallace and elgyem beeped harshly as the impact knocked him further back.

Mila hissed and fought to be let go as Wallace rubbed his stinging eyes. He turned to Neo, a blurred and almost ethereal figure against the roar of flames. "Neo! What was that?" he yelled, his eyes burning to tears as he forced them open.

"An attack," he replied. "Here comes another."

Peals of thunder drew Wallace's attention to the sky. He watched grey wisps of smoke melt into what he thought was a sable sky, but found fissure-like splits in the clouds and caught glimpses of the actual sky. It was faint, but the color of charcoal was distinguishable beneath the heavy mantle of storm clouds gathering above the field.

"Galvantula, another thunder."

Letting Mila onto the ground, Wallace wrenched himself to face the stretch of grass that had become a battlefield as the galvantula's four legs steadied it in place, sparks of electricity circuiting its body. Elgyem's hands lit up, but before Wallace could validate elgyem's action to launch a counterattack the air grew heavy with the onset of another attack.

Elgyem's head snapped up to the sky as he flew from spot to spot, zigzagging toward galvantula as another bolt of lightning struck the field. Not as grand or blinding as the first, Wallace found himself focusing on Neo's pokémon as elgyem neared it.

"Elgyem, go for a psybeam," Wallace said, counting the number of sparks that roamed galvantula's body, five seemed to cross its fur at any given minute and more joined as it prepared an electric attack, if he could time elgyem's attacks in its cooldown period the advantage would be his.

"Use flash," Neo said.

As elgyem soared into galvantula's path, Wallace couldn't find the words in time as flecks of light formed between a pair of appendages connected to it head. The lights reacted to one another, glowing brighter as elgyem came in closer, arms raised to strike, but as the undeniable warble of a psychic attacks began the lights galvantula had formed exploded.

The flare was intense, light that scorched Wallace's eyes, sheeting his vision white and for a moment he thought he'd lost the ability to hear as well as the entire field went silent. He felt around ahead of him, groping the air as he turned, expecting Neo to make a move in his moment of weakness, but when he heard Neo's voice it sounded far off.

"Light screen, and then launch into another thunder," he said.

Wallace's sight returned as if he'd just woken up, in blurred shapes and few colors. Slowly the dark green grass punctuated the borders of his sight as the dark gradient of the campus filled in. Between himself and a crowd of onlookers he found galvantula's yellow body behind what looked like panels of shimmering glass that vanished as soon as his eyes focused on them.

Flicking his eyes in every direction Wallace searched the field for elgyem and a strobe of lights brought his attention to the grass several yards to the right of galvantula. Elgyem floated near the ground, hands dragging the grass as he struggled to remain aloft. He sagged for a moment, dropping to the ground in a heap then struggled to rise again.

"Elgy, teleport to me!" Wallace cried.

Rather than vanish in a glint of light, elgyem fell to the ground again and sat up, his hands coming to his face as he squeezed his eyes shut. A cold fist gripped Wallace's heart as a crying sound came from elgyem, a high pitched wail that brought Wallace to his knees. The idea of elgyem's large and inquisitive eyes taking the full brunt of a flash pained him and left him short of breath to utter another command as a bolt of lightning fell onto the psychic-type.

Wallace pulled at the grass to get himself to his feet as he ran for elgyem, but while en route, elgyem became nothing but a dark figure in the middle of the lightning strike. The crowd of watchers gasped as Wallace shuttered back at the moment of impact, only to charge forward when the light faded. Galvantula clicked at him as he passed, but didn't move as Wallace slid into the grass beside his pokémon, Mila galloping behind him.

The grass surrounding the point of impact was black, steam flittering off the charred blades of grass while dark marks like veins marred elgyem's pale blue skin. His eyes were shut and as Wallace ran his hand over his slick skin he found tension with the tips of his fingers, as if elgyem struggled to keep his eyes closed. At the crown of elgyem's head Wallace found an impact mark, dark scorch-like marks where the bolt struck him. He ventured to touch the spot and found it hot to the touch.

"Elgy, open for your eyes for me, please," he begged, his voice watery as he pulled the psychic-type into his lap, rubbing his back and attempting to coax him to relax. Elgyem remained in the same pose he'd been in before the attack, crunched over, hands pressed to his face, and seemed unable to move from it. "Elgy?"

"Wallace!" Eleanor cried with the thuds of her feet as she charged over and slid down beside him. "Is he okay?"

"I – I don't know, he's not moving, look." Wallace's voice trembled as he uncoiled his arms, letting elgyem sit perched on his forearms like a statue.

With slow hands, Eleanor grabbed elgyem's leg and tried to straighten it. Wallace watched Eleanor's gentle approach change to something more forceful as elgyem's leg refused to straighten from its curled position. "He's paralyzed, maybe in shock," she said, rubbing his leg instead of pulling on it as she groped her pockets. "I don't have any medicine on me, shoot."

Wallace's eyes burned again, on the verge of tears as he pulled elgyem to his chest and began to rock back and forth. Eleanor clutched his shoulder as she got to her knees and started asking those on the field for a paralyze heal.

He heard mutters from the crowd, but no one seemed to step forward as Eleanor's pleas for help grew more desperate.

"Please!" she cried, her nails digging into Wallace's shoulder. "Oh my god!" she grunted, falling down beside Wallace again. "It's okay, this kind of thing happens... Have you never seen a condition like this?"

Wallace's pursed his lips into a flat line, his arms crossing over elgyem as he cradled him to his chest. He shook his head and shook the tears free that began to dribble down his cheeks.

"This is what it looks like," Neo said from behind Wallace. "When no one wants you around."

"Neo!" Eleanor snapped. "Give me a paralyze heal, please."

"Sorry, don't have any," Neo said, cooly.

"That's not – I know you do, you're never not prepared," Eleanor said.

Wallace closed his eyes, his mouth hanging open as he felt Eleanor's grip on his shoulder change again, tensing when she spoke to Neo and slackening as he brushed off her request.

"I'm reorganizing my supplies before the first day of classes," Neo said. "I didn't bring anything because I didn't expect to be battling anyone."

Eleanor sagged beside him before a jolt seemed to renew life in her. "Pearl!" she gasped. She sat back and dug a Poké Ball from her pocket and flicked it onto the grass, from it emerged a statuesque gallade. "Pearl, can you please use heal pulse?" Eleanor asked, her hands clasped in prayer.

Pearl bent a knee before Wallace who unfolded his arms. Elgyem fell off balance and laid across Wallace's forearms as Pearl leaned over the fetal positioned pokémon. The gallade brought his hands a foot apart, flecks of pink light forming between its limbs that gathered into a ball.

Gallade lowered the ball and it shattered, breaking into pink sparkles and wisps of white smoke and lights that showered elgyem.

Eleanor sighed and clutched her chest. "I can't believe I forgot I had Pearl. It won't heal the condition, Wallace, but it'll take away some of the pain. Elgyem will be okay, just find a paralyze heal, or a berry."

Wallace watched the light from gallade's heal pulse fade, wishing it lasted longer as nothing about elgyem seemed to change. The dark veins across his body hadn't receded and his posture felt as tense as before. As he looked over elgyem he noticed the scorch marks on his head were gone, the flesh there only warm, instead of burning under his fingertips.

"It's okay," he said, pulling elgyem's still form back to his chest. He rocked there for a minute whispering reassuring words as he listened to Eleanor and Neo bicker about Neo initiating a battle without proper warning.

He heard Neo's voice raise and Pearl launched away from Wallace. Turning, Wallace saw the gallade standing before his trainer, protecting her from Neo who looked red in the face.

Neo backed away and waved to his galvantula who came to his side. A dark place inside Wallace thought the two might battle, but instead Neo walked off with galvantula and Eleanor recalled her gallade.

"C'mon, let's get you back to your room," Eleanor said as her hands appeared on Wallace's back.

He rose with care, never letting elgyem leave the cradle against his chest, and walked with Eleanor from the field, through a part in the crowd. He caught different looks as he left, some looking ashamed they couldn't or didn't help, while some even looked pleased.

* * *

It was close to midnight when Wallace finished treating elgyem. After Eleanor dropped him off he laid out a collection of berries, all contained in plastic ware and several bottles of medicine.

He broke the lock on the yellow bottle of paralyze heal and laid out a towel on his bed with elgyem in the center. His team watched in silence as he sprayed elgyem, section by section and rubbed in the serum. Over time, as he finished working the medicine into elgyem's back, the first areas he treated began to heal, the dark vein marks vanishing back beneath the skin. He sat on his floor, watching, until the veins had vanished from his skin and elgyem looked like his old self. At some point during the treatment elgyem had fallen asleep and his body loosened. Wallace followed up the paralysis treatment with a super potion as elgyem slept.

When he was sure as sure as he could be that elgyem would wake fine, he tossed his shower stuff into a kit, draped a towel over his arm, and left his room. The bathroom was in sight the moment he stepped into the hall, no time to waste in searching for it or pretending he couldn't find it. He inched down the hall, his flip-flops echoing with every slap against his heels.

He paused across the hall from the bathroom's door, pressed against the painted brick as he initiated a stare down with the wood. He willed himself to take the three steps across the hall and push his way inside, but something more primal kept him rooted in place. Fear. He swallowed hard as the door swung open and someone came out, sliding on the tile when they noticed him.

"Shit," the boy said as he tightened his grip on a towel around his waist and glared at Wallace. "What are you doing?"

Wallace was deaf to the boy's words as he watched the door swing shut, the sliver of the interior he could see taking him back to the night of his attack. The inside was the same, unflattering tiles on the walls and floors, white sinks embed into a blue-green countertop that sat fixed into the wall under a row of mirrors.

He heard the click of the door lock ring out in his mind. He felt the uncertain slide of his flip-flops on wet tile as Willow and James appeared before him. As the door neared shutting he visualized himself, sprawled on the floor, his blood painting the tiles as Willow and James hovered around him.

Pain throbbed across his face again, as if the injuries hadn't healed and the feeling of fabric restraining his wrists came back to him all at once. In his mind he caught glimpses of Willow reentering the bathroom with an armful of rope and rags.

James made sly comments as he wrapped the rope around his own limbs then leaned over Wallace and tied his wrists and ankles together then ran a rope between the two, making it impossible for Wallace to stand. Willow worked in silence as she balled up a rag and forced it into his mouth, brandishing a stretch of tape after that went over his mouth.

Bound and bloodied, James lifted him over his shoulder and carried him from the bathroom. As he watched the hallway shrink between bouts of darkness he prayed one of the doors would open, that one person would come out for a drink of water and see him, but no one did.

As the door clicked shut, the clap of hands in front of his face snapped Wallace back. He jolted back against the wall to find Cole standing beside him. "What?" Wallace asked.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Cole said. "What are you doing? You know the bathroom isn't one at a time, right?"

"Right," Wallace said, his eyes drifting to a random series of scratches and scars that marked Cole's chest. As his eyes traced the curves and dark blemishes he noticed the faint outline of ribs through his midsection. What drew Wallace's attention were Cole's legs, multicolored and destroyed by what he knew were burn scars. Many conversations with Nurse Joie had left Wallace with unshakable images of burn survivors.

"You gonna pay for the premium experience or just take the free trial?" Cole asked.

Wallace snapped back to Cole's eyes, locking onto the boy's almost golden eyes. "What?"

"Forget it," Cole said, running a hand through his unruly dark hair. "No one at this school has a sense of humor, anyway, I'm not gonna stand here and air dry with you. See ya 'round." Cole headed off to Wallace's left, waving above his head.

As the squelch of Cole's feet vanished inside a room, Wallace went back to staring at the bathroom door before an idea struck him. He rushed back into his room, startling Nicki who shot up in bed, their laptop clattering to the floor which earned Wallace a slew of curses.

He ignored Nicki's questions about why he was back so soon as he gathered a change of clothes and stacked everything onto the ekans box. "Wink," he said, whistling as he headed for the door. While spinarak and Mila lounged on his bed, playing nurses to elgyem who lay curled on Wallace's pillow, Wink came skittering out from under his bed and out the door.

Thinking of the quickest path, Wallace and Wink made a trip to the opposite side of the building and left through the northeast exit and took shortcuts between buildings until they reached the eastern side of campus. Leaving the wooden dock, Wallace descended past a line of shrubbery until he was on the beach.

He left the ekans box and his change of clothes on the beach and undressed, the sight and sound of the waves lapping the shore bringing memories of homecoming night to forefront of his mind. The sound of uneven waves made his liquored mind spin and only worsened the gut wrenching feeling of Andrew's confessional video.

Leaving his clothes and towel with the box, Wallace and Wink headed down the beach and into the water. The water was warm, slightly colder than the waters of Shalour City, though it could have been the lack of trunks attributing to the change. Wallace swam with Wink out several yards before they raced back to shore, Wink coming in first.

After acclimating himself to water and the feeling of it touching him everywhere. Wallace washed with a bar of soap and washed his hair, rinsing off by taking a dive with Wink, using the totodile as a guide to navigate the dark waters.

As they made their ascent, had Wallace been born with a tail fin he might have propelled himself from the water as something soft and wispy brushed his leg. "Wink!" he gasped, breaking the surface like a clumsy wailord. "Was that you?"

"Toto?" Wink chirped as his snout came up in front of Wallace.

Wallace started to kick for his life, his arms cutting through the water, forgetting about form and only desiring to get out of the water when a head broke the surface in his path. He faltered, gagging on water as he lost his balance and dipped below the surface. In the shallows he made out glittering scales and a long tail, but where he expected the scales to taper off and meet the skin of something like a milotic, instead he found a stomach, a human stomach. His eyes registered every inch of skin before they came upon a seashell bra, a pair of arms, and a face that dunked below the water, smiling at him.

Wallace screamed, expelling all the air in his lungs and flooding his vision with bubbles, an act that sent him sputtering to the surface and clawing at his face to clear away the water.

"Did I scare you?"

Wallace rubbed water from his eyes as he took in the sight of a girl floating in the water feet from him. "Are you a mermaid?" he asked, his voice grave as he took note of Wink floating just inches away.

"Maybe in a former life, or maybe in my next one," the girl said back as the scaled tail emerged beside her. Moonlight reflected off oval scales of blue and green, glistening with sea water. "I'm Alexia Violette, junior, and part-time mermaid, in my dreams."

Something splashed as Alexia lowered her tail and startled Wallace as a smaller pink tail flopped the surface as something circled the girl. A fin broke the surface in front of Alexia before the thin pink head emerged and a large wide eye took in the sight of Wallace.

"This is Beauty, my gorebyss," Alexia said. "Say hi."

Beauty turned in the water and her tail cut through, sending a splash at Wallace's face before the gorebyss vanished beneath the surface.

Alexia gasped and slapped the water, but didn't seem upset. "Beauty!" she said, giggling.

"So you swim as a mermaid at night?" he asked, wiping water from his face again.

"As often as I can," Alexia said. "I'm not breaking any rules, in case you were thinking of reporting me."

"Well, I'm out here too, so I can't exactly tell on both of us," he said back.

"I guess," Alexia said. "So, you like swimming? I saw you racing with that totodile, you have good form."

"You saw me?" he asked, sinking into the water lower, eyeing his pile of clothes left on the beach.

"You have nothing to be embarrassed about, believe me," Alexia said, her voice drawing out as her eyes stayed to the water between them.

"What does that mean?" he asked, wondering how well her eyesight was if she was used to swimming at night.

"Lots of people like skinny dipping, though most don't do it alone," she said as she swished her hand slowly across the surface of the water. "Just saying."

"That's not what I was doing," Wallace said, kicking himself slowly toward the shore, while keeping his distance from the mermaid. He choose not to tell her she was taking a bath, using the sea as his tub because he'd been jumped in the school bathroom and the idea of stepping inside made his knees turn to mush.

"Oh? Then where are your clothes?" Alexia asked, winking.

"Can you like, swim off somewhere?" Wallace asked, forcing out a laugh. "I want to get out and don't need you watching me."

Alexia shrugged and started to move through the water, her tail leaving ripples behind her. "I mean, I think I've seen it all at this point, no need to be so shy," she said. "But as you wish. I'll go back to my search for treasure."

Wallace started to climb the shore, but kept his hips below the water until Alexia was a good distance away. When her back was fully toward him he darted up the beach, Wink racing after him, and grabbed his towel. He couldn't secure it fast enough, but when he turned back Alexia was facing him again.

"Do you want one?" Alexia asked.

"What?"

"One of my treasures," she said. "Beauty and I hunt for things on the seafloor. Trainers drop a lot of things when they're swimming, flying-types drop stuff too. I've found pearls, nuggets, relics, all kinds of stuff. If I find something good, do you want it?"

"Sure," he said, shrugging.

"Alright, but you have to come back here to get it," Alexia said. "It won't be as special if I hand it over when I'm on two legs, deal?"

"I'm sure I'll be back," he said, despite the interruption bathing in the sea wasn't as bad as he expected and a far less terrifying option than facing the bathroom again.

"Coolness," she said with a wave before she dove below the surface, her mermaid tail splashing up after her.

Wallace waited for the water to die down before he dried off and redressed. He bundled everything up into a pile before he dragged the box down the beach and popped the flaps. He waited behind the box, wondering if it was possible the ekans had escaped, but Nicki assured him it was still inside and that they'd fed it to keep it from dying in their room.

Wink nudged the back of the box and a hiss followed as ekans slithered out, its body cutting a groove through the sand. It turned his head back and flicked its tongue at Wallace before it wandered way from the water and vanished between the shrubs.

"Bye, snake," Wallace said as he dumped his clothes, soap, and shampoo into the box and headed up the beach. "Let's go, Wink," he said, slipping his wallet into his pocket.

Balancing the box, weighted by his damp towel and shower supplies, on his hip, Wallace walked with Wink down one of the pathways that led to the front of his dorm building. He tossed his flip-flops into the box as well, the silence of campus being much welcomed after his day. As he passed a lamp post the mellow orange light flickered off. He paused, only slightly concerned as he watched the dying bulb, expecting it to flick back on at any moment, but it never did.

Wink nipped at his ankle when he stood there for too long, urging him onward. He turned away from the Origin Center and crossed a paved path toward the main section of campus when something set him on high alert. A sound, something unfit for the campus surroundings had him scanning the buildings around him. He heard it for only a second before it vanished into the wind.

As quiet as campus seemed, it was only in Wallace's head as the wind made regional flags flap ahead of him and tree branches scratched the sides of buildings all around. After a moment of paranoia, Wallace let himself calm down and continue walking, but only made it to the other walkway when he stopped again.

Something gnawed at the back of his mind and made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. A feeling he couldn't shake turned the flesh on his arms and legs to bumps as he realized it wasn't a sound that had given him pause, it was a sensation. One he'd felt before after he met Antionette and he wandered the berry field's land, the intense prickling feeling of someone sneaking up on you in silence.

An almost crippling form of fear nearly kept Wallace facing forward, but curiosity that prodded his mind had Wallace craning his neck around.

The path behind him was illuminated by street lamps for several meters, but the lights then died away, like the one he passed under, several lights down the path were out, the grounds dark without the aid of moonlight. His eyes strained down the path as he picked up slight movement, a figure shifting and pulling away from the shadows as a person emerged from the darkness and stepped into the light of the lamps. Even with his contacts the distance was too far to make out any features, though he had to guess it was a man. After watching them for a moment, Wallace realized they were headed his way, walking along the same path and that if he stood there long enough, they'd catch up to him.

Turning back, Wallace kept walking, focusing on the stones in front of him, though the presence of someone in his blindspot made his entire head feel like it'd been set ablaze. He held his normal pace until the sound of footfalls, shoes thudding against the stone reached his ears. He glanced back and found the figure much closer, still unable to make out any features other than a large build, but he could tell their steps had hastened.

Wallace turned back and whispered to Wink as they both started to move faster, but as their steps quickened, so did the pursuer's. Throwing back another glance Wallace saw the figure sprinting for him. Arms flying at their side, cutting through the air and legs pumping, Wallace's heart leaped into his throat.

He turned back and started running, Wink dashing at his side on two legs. They rounded the edge of a classroom building and Wallace fell into the shadows, throwing himself against the brick. He dropped the box at his side and clamped a hand to his mouth to muffle his breathing. His heart thumped so loudly it heard it over the swaying tree branches as he tried to listen for approaching steps, though he heard none.

He waited for what felt like an hour, until his hair dried and his skin began to feel dry and caked without the aid of hot water from an actual shower. "Wink, look around the corner," he whispered, shooing Wink in that direction.

The totodile snapped his jaws at Wallace, but scuttled in that direction and darted out onto the path. Wallace watched Wink's eye move in its socket before he hissed and Wallace joined him on the path. Unprepared for what might be there, Wallace was stunned to find the path empty. He narrowed and unfocused his eyes in every direction, but aside from himself and Wink the path was empty and nothing moved aside from the trees.

"Hello?" he called out, his voice carrying down between the buildings. "Alexia?" he asked, wondering if the girl had taken to following him, though the figure looked too bulky to belong to her.

He waited for a reply, though he didn't want to receive one, and when he began to feel foolish he retreated into the space between the buildings to grab the box, but paused when it wasn't there. His hands hovered in the air, still posed to grab the large box by its side as his mind registered its absence where he'd left it.

"Wink?" he asked, looking to his totodile for validation. "I left the box here," he said, touching the air where the box should be.

"Toto," Wink gurgled, bobbing his head in agreement.

Wallace stood tall and looked ahead of him, down a narrow path was a small space between the two buildings where street lamps and moonlight didn't reach. A darkness spread from the space that Wallace couldn't see through, so he backed away and back onto the path and without a second thought he ran.

He listened for the scrape of Wink's claws behind him as he ran toward the dorm hall and flashed his ID against the reader. After Wink scurried inside, tripping on the rug, Wallace pulled the door shut and pressed himself against it, his breath fogging the glass.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Six

* * *

 ** _AN:_** Character debuts: **Julian Grimoire** by **The Awkward Trumpet** , **Nicki Bonheur** by **Mysticreaper** , **Alina Verdue** by **JustTheClassicalGirl** , and **Alexia Violette** by **The Awkward Trumpet**.

 **Question of the Chapter #35:** Do you think Wallace is able to survive being at school?


	37. Is This The Wallace?

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Seven – Is This _The_ Wallace?**

 _Mixing memory and desire – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Following the close encounter of the strange kind outside his building, anxiety and buzzing fear kept Wallace too jittery to lay down for the night, so he began a search of the building instead. He roamed through every hall of every floor in search of a bathroom he thought he might be suitable to use and conquer his fears.

Venturing through the echoey basement, passing dozens of coordinator students who lived in the underground halls, he discovered a small unisex bathroom with a sink and a toilet, and most importantly a lock. He rinsed his hair again, the hot water from the sink meeting his scalp a welcome reunion and as he dried off with paper towels he wondered how long trips to the beach would last as temperatures dropped.

At three am he dropped strategically into bed, mindful of the sleeping positions of Elgy, Mila, and spinarak, BUT he didn't close his eyes, the white noise in his head too unbearable in the dark of his room. To occupy his thoughts he pulled the blinds, allowing a block of moonlight to illuminate his bed as he settled into his pillow, but continued to elude sleep as he pictured the figure a sprinting man, delineated against the moon.

The hours of his sleepless night dragged by until the warm hues of the rising sun bathed him. Nicki snored through a chunk of the morning as the sun climbed above the campus, loud enough to rouse Wallace's entire team who began to growl and chirp for food. Elgyem was the most active, floating above Wallace'd bed, his cheerful demeanor a welcome return considering his battle and complete shutdown the previous day.

He performed a follow-up on elgyem, checking him for any marks or the return of the dark veins, but to his delight found nothing that gave cause for alarm.

Digging out painted glass bowls he'd purchased in Lumiose, Wallace piled food out for his team and changed his clothes. He watched his team gobble their breakfast and waited to see who would finish eating first, but Nicki's snoring drew attention to the other side of the room. His roommate lay sprawled across their bed in a silk pink nightgown with a sleep shade over their eyes, as graceful as a silver starlet had he been deaf and unable to hear the grating gravel-like sounds of their snores.

Sharp pricks on his ankle alerted Wallace that someone finished eating and he jerked his leg away, Mila latching onto his sneaker, purring as she slid across the floor. "Let's get coffee," he said.

Leaving his room, Wallace walked with Mila bounding at his side as he passed closed doors in his hall. For each door he passed, he wondered who lived inside, strangers or former classmates. His thoughts drifted to what type of run-ins he might have with them at some point, the nature of which would be left to fate as to how they'd play out.

Café Rose, a cozy coffee shop inside a multi-level lounge in Wallace's dorm welcomed him with the potent smell of coffee beans and alluring syrups. Mila wasted no time in running, full speed, through the lounge, sniffling and biting at furniture as she explored the upper and lower levels. Wallace footsteps echoed over the hollow sounding wood floors and passed white leather armchairs and a non-functional fireplace on his way to the shop.

Behind a wood and marble topped counter stood a familiar girl with her back to Wallace. Her white-blonde hair with blue highlights shook as she dumped a clump of wet coffee grounds into the trash. From behind a half-wall a fuzzy pancham darted into Wallace's sight with its small arms filled to the brim with wrapped straws. Wallace watched it vanish and reappear as it ran from the shop and to a caddy to refill a dispenser. "Azalea?" he asked, watching the pancham.

"Hi! What can I get for you?"

In the moment Azalea turned to him he caught a glimpse of a bright and pleasant expression, tailor made for greeting customers, but her winning smile slid off her face as she saw realized who she'd greeted.

"Oh." Azalea's eyes drooped as she turned her body a small register and stuffed her hands into the pockets of a black apron with an embroidered coffee mug on the front surrounded by rose petals. "What can I get for you?" she repeated, her tone one reserved for funeral eulogies.

Wallace tried to smile, but found it difficult to maintain against with Azalea's deadeye expression. He lifted his gaze to the digital menus above her head, entertaining the idea of ordering a cinnamon cappuccino and watching Azalea's stone faced gaze in the bottom of his vision. The infectious excitement he knew Azalea to have seemed all but gone and her hair lacked the same sheen. In the near year since their last encounter, Azalea seemed to have aged, evidenced by the small lines of worry etched into the skin of her sagging face.

Wallace shrugged, feigning indecisiveness with his order as he focused on Azalea. "So, how have you been?" he asked.

Azalea's lips pursed and Wallace readied himself for her retort, but as her eyes narrowed on him and she seemed to swallow her initial reply. "Oh you know, fabulous," she said, at last, her eyes falling to the register screen in front of her her. "Changing my major practically reset my credits, delaying my graduation. Pictures of you and I at homecoming made me public enemy number one when all the news of your family spilled out. I've got negative four friends and I'm stuck working here for like, ever, to pay for tuition as I lost my scholarships because I can't compete anymore."

As she spoke, Wallace watched Azalea's fair complexion change to something tinged with pink as her hands shot from her apron and gripped the edge of the register screen. A vein in the side of her neck bulged, throbbing with each syllable that left her lips as if her own answer took her to a new anger point.

"Other than that, I think I'm doing fine, but please, tell me how else can I be of service to you, Mr. Pearce?" she asked, batting her lashes in a faux act of being urbane. "You must be here because you need me to tell you something about Andrew you don't already know. I'm sure you two had fun talking about me while you hung out."

At a loss for words, Wallace held his eyes on Azalea. He pictured himself as a trainer who'd encountered a feral pokémon and hoped he could avoid an attack by holding eye contact, that in some way he'd communicate everything lost through a language barrier brought on by a difference in species. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice weak knowing it was the lamest thing to tell her, the sound of the lounge's door opening across the room drawing his attention away from her eyes.

Wallace recognized the newcomer to the lounge on sight, her bone straight black hair bouncing behind her as she trounced across the room in pair of heels that made the lanky girl tower over the room as she came to the counter. "Azalea, hi!" she gasped, tapping her fingers on the counter. "I'm Alina, I'm a coordinator and I just had to come meet you. I didn't believe it when someone told me you worked here!"

Wallace found himself sliding to the side as Alina took center stage in front of the register, capable of stealing Azalea's attention away from him and pacifying her anger. Instead of contest attire, Alina wore a two piece red plaid outfit, a blazer with a matching skirt that didn't reached her knees.

Azalea's eyes worked overtime to check out the girl's outfit and keep Wallace in sight. Oh?" she asked, her pique fading.

Alina pulled her hands to her chest and sighed, happy. "I'm a huge fan! Your feats in the performance world are legend in Unova," Alina said, spreading her hands in a grandiose fashion as she casting a look over her shoulder to Wallace. Her head cocked to the side as she twisted on her feet, a pair of narrowed blue eyes cast upon him. "Hello. Did I interrupt something?"

Wallace found himself following Azalea's lead in splitting his attention between Alina and Azalea as he forced a smile and a small wave. "Hi, I think – I think I saw you last night, at the bonfire, you and snivy were incredible."

Alina closed her eyes, smiled, and touched a hand to her chest. "I know. My energy ball shower move always leaves them wanting more."

Wallace's brow furrowed, feeling his compliment soar and land with a splat as he watched Alina's exaggerated movements. Judging off her tone and the way she dismissed him to continue gushing to Azalea, he guessed she was the type to expect frequent praise.

"I also heard you changed your major," Alina said, dragging nail across the countertop, her bottom lip pouted out. "That's so sad."

"Yeah, well it wasn't my choice exactly," Azalea said, her bright eyes flicking onto Wallace, a move Alina noticed.

"Oh?" Alina's hand came snapping to her shoulder, her nails stroking the air as she turned to Wallace and set her eyes into surveying him from top to bottom, again. "Was it your doing?"

Wallace mulled over a way to deflect the blame as Azalea hummed in confirmation of Alina's question, her posture changing to match the coordinator's. "It wasn't!" he said, with more force than needed in the empty shop. "The Roses did it, I had nothing to do with that."

"Whatever," Azalea said, her eyes rolling to the back of her head as she began to tap on the register. "You being around me didn't help the aftermath. And I hate those stupid Roses. So glad their greenhouse burned down."

Wallace gaped at Azalea as she flipped her hair and went back to talking to ogling Alina. "Wait, say what?"

"Are you deaf?" Alina asked, smirking. "She said a greenhouse burned down, what's the big deal?"

Wallace held eye contact with Azalea as he drifted out of their conversation. Occasionally he saw Alina casting looks in his direction, which grew fiercer the longer she and Azalea had time to whisper behind his back as he retreated across the lounge and moved toward the steps.

"He shouldn't have come back," Azalea said as he climbed to the lower level.

Brushing off Azalea's comment, Wallace found the lower level empty, nothing but armchairs chairs and couches. He took a seat on a large grey leather couch in the corner as Mila leaped onto the couch and pawed at the leather, burying her face between the cushions.

As he made himself comfortable, Wallace felt his eyes getting heavier and the urge to fall asleep appealing to him, though the image of the running man played through his mind and kept him lurching into wakefulness. As he tried to focus on something else, Azalea's comment began to play on a loop through his mind, a fire at the Roses' greenhouse. Launching up from the couch, Wallace ran to the adjacent side of the lounge and pressed himself to a wall of glass windows and narrowed his eyes.

Outside of the dorm hall, stone paths cross one another, each leading to different classroom buildings. To his left was the Gracieda Center, to the right sat Myrrh Hall, and furthest from the lounge, across a large lawn sat Neroli and its glass greenhouse the Roses operated out of.

Across the distance and through trees, Wallace could make out the sight of the building's foundation, but wasn't able to see anything else. No panes of glass reflected the sunlight and stood out against the scenery, which either meant it no longer existed to do such, or he need to get closer.

Making a mental note to take his team and check the greenhouse, Wallace moved back to the couch and allowed time to crawl past as he ran through reasons why someone would want to attack the greenhouse. In his mental trance, a handful of students came in and ordered something. Some joined Wallace on the lower level to drink their coffee, but most retreated back upstairs at first sight of him. As thoughts of running men and fires consumed him to the point of paranoia, he passed time with a wrapped straw he found, using it to taunt Mila who pounced across the couch to catch the paper coating.

A pair entering the lounge from the side door distracted Wallace, allowing Mila to attach to his hand and rip the straw wrapper to shreds. The litleo growled as she revealed a blue straw beneath and trotted off with it as Simone and Ben locked eyes with Wallace and crossed the lounge to him.

"Look what blew back into town," Simone said, her dark face glistening with sweat, fresh from a training session in her leggings and sports bra. She swiped a napkin from a holder, dabbed her face and dropped onto the couch beside Wallace. "Welcome back."

"Are you sure you want to be seen with me?" he said, watching as Ben hovered a few steps from the couch, looking unable to take the empty seat in a chair beside Wallace. "Hi, Ben."

"You think I've got time to be worry about what people are going to say if they see us talking?" Simone asked, gesturing for Ben to sit like a mom would urge her kid to behave. "I'm not bothered dot com about these kids and their opinion."

"How have you guys been? How was the rest of freshman year, your summers?" Wallace asked, working on conveying a pleasant tone despite the haze of sleep fogging his mind.

"Things were good after they settled down," Simone said, smirking in his direction. "I got a special permit to travel to Kiloude City and took some courses on battling at the elite caliber, that was fun. One step closer to becoming an elite myself. Ben?"

Ben jumped in his seat near Simone and brushed back some strands of his hair that hung over his eyes, his brown locks longer than Wallace remembered. "Nothing really happened," he said, focusing on a spot on the floor.

"He's being weird," Simone scoffed. "He helped reorganize the library here and got to meet Professor Sycamore."

"That's awesome!" Wallace said, forcing enthusiasm into his voice, though it didn't earn a reaction from Ben like he hoped. "That's really great, i'm happy for you."

Simone craned her neck to Wallace, an odd smile playing across her lips. "Ben, I'm kind of hungry," she said, causing Ben's attention to shift to her as she nodded toward the coffee shop. "Would you mind?"

"I guess." Ben frowned, but shook his head and stood, leaving the two of them alone as he climbed the steps to the shop.

Wallace watched Ben's head vanish from sight as Simone's hand landed on his knee. "What?" he gasped.

"That was hard to watch, you acting all soccer mom to Ben. If you're going to pretend you care you're going to have to work on it," Simone said.

"I do care," Wallace said, looking at his fiddling fingers. "It's just hard lately, I never know how people are going to act around me."

"Like I said, I pay them no mind. Now, let's talk Orphans."

Wallace swallowed hard as he studied Simone's eyes, brown and burning with determination. "O-kay?" he asked. "I didn't have any run ins with them while I was away, and I haven't heard anything."

"Damn," Simone said, letting go of his leg. She sighed and dropped back onto the couch, her arms crossing over her chest. "They're the ones who took you, right?"

What could have been a sudden burst from the lounge's air conditioner turned Wallace's skin to bumps at the mention of his abduction, though he knew it to be an encroaching feeling of dread. "You, you knew?" he muttered, shuddering as Simone stared easily off into the distance, watching Mila chase her tail between table legs.

"Of course," she said, flicking her eyes in his direction. "I didn't believe that story the University put out for one second."

Wallace nodded as he tried to keep himself from tensing up, rubbing his arms and legs to ward off the chill. His frantic swim from the island brought him to back to campus, exhausted, waterlogged, and on the verge of hypothermia. The doctor's told him he was lucky a groundskeeper discovered him on the beach when he did, as too much exposure to the elements could have done irreparable damage.

He recalled moments from the most uncomfortable sleep he'd ever had. His body in a contact state of confusion as it urged him to sleep there on the beach, drenched and freezing to death at a slugma's pace, while laggardly coming to a form of wakefulness from self preservation as his body sent emergency signals to his brain. He remembered a shaking tremor as the groundskeeper found him, his voice a bullhorn in his head, and then arms around him.

Between fading scenes of darkness, he was taken to the Clinic and looked at by a nurse, then padded in what felt like cotton. He remembered something warm crawling into his bed and curling to his body, its infectious heat warming in a matter of minutes. Andrew's mother appeared and fought over the cause of his injuries and his treatment and discussions of a transfer as his safety was paramount. He was then taken from campus and sent back to Lumiose.

His days in Lumiose were filled with new and familiar faces. He'd become accustomed to the sight of Andrew, unshaved and puffy eyed during his visits. Carrie came, her voice a welcome reminder that someone cared for him with fierce determination as she fought with nurses, tooth and nail, for updates on his recovery. Along with them, two nurses, a police officer, and a therapist all visited him. The latter half of the four sat by his bedside and tried to discuss what happened, but talking was difficult with stitches on his tongue.

At times Carrie's verbal assaults weren't limited to the nurses as the police officer came to talk to Wallace in the mornings. He filled the room with questions regarding Wallace's actions prior to leaving Lumiose, a vague timeline given to them by Andrew filled them in on his plans to return to school. Following that, security footage on campus showed him entering his dorm hall, but following that, they needed his input on the four days that led to him being found on the beach.

He cried at the idea of the cameras failing to catch him leaving the building, something that tormented him during his stay in the Orphan's mansion when no signs of help seemed to be coming. He wanted to say everything, spill every secret and familiarize everyone with the Orphans, but just as withholding the truth became too big a burden, a representative from the University arrived with news that a tip from a student led police to search the safari island and the mansion. The police had come across the mansion, covered in ice, as well as James' body, preserved under the frost.

What started as an investigation regarding Wallace's safety became a murder investigation. He remained quiet after that, despite knowing who the anonymous tip had come from, he remained a silence figure in the room as the representative, the officer, and therapist swarmed his bed. At Carrie's suggestion he gave a statement of his return to campus and his innocence in the death of James. The following day, his pokémon and things were collected from the University and returned to him or sent home.

The representative read Wallace a statement regarding his return to the University, the only version of the truth he had been permitted to tell. He traveled by sea, but fell victim to a wild encounter that left him wounded on the beach, and in return for his enrollment he was unable to speak publicly of anything that stayed from that story.

Officially, Wallace never returned to school, was never taken from the bathroom, never held hostage, and had no knowledge of a murder, simply overwhelmed at sea. One thing he omitted from his statement was Don, he'd never seen him on campus, never spoken to him in his room, and without that knowledge there was no one who could say Wallace actually made it to campus as long as the University kept his appearance on security cameras under wraps.

In the days following, he left his room with a nurse by his side and made to walk to build strength which was a herculean task due to his broken ribs. He cried seeing himself in the mirror, broken and bloodied. The remainder of his hospital stay was similar, daily visits from police, a therapist, and a school official, laggard walks through the halls like an unwanted ghost, and tears in the mirror.

"How you'd escape anyway?" Simone asked. "I mean, I guess you did get away the first time, but they had you, completely isolated from everything, right? You must have a guardian angel or something."

Wallace grimaced, eyeing Simone whose stare had become distance and fixed on something across the room. "Or something," he said, knowing full well his window of opportunity of escape was possible because of the commotion that pulled the Orphans away from him as they searched for an intruder in the mansion, the intruder that battled and killed James.

"Did do manage to take any of them out as you left?" she asked quickly.

"No!" he said, turning toward her on the couch, her tone frightening him, as if she gained a sense of enjoyment from death. "Why would you say something like that?"

"Because they're criminals, terrorists," she said. "I want them to die, all of them," she said, her head snapping in his direction at the thought of a death she could justify.

Wallace kept his mouth shut, boring holes into Simone's face, trying to connect her deranged words with her calm and stoic features. "I'll handle it, no one else needs to die."

"Oh yeah? How?"

"I'm going to find out what they've been up to this entire time," he said, rubbing his arms, despite the chills having receeded.

Simone blinked, her eyes narrowing on him, her lips twitching. "I say again, how?"

"There's an Orphan on campus, she's a student," Wallace said. "I was thinking of talking to her her, she's not like the rest, she's helpful, kind of."

"No way, who is she?" Simone asked, her eyes glinting. "Do I know her?"

"Willow Oakburn, Professor Oakburn's little sister," Wallace said. "I didn't see her at the bonfire yesterday, I really don't know how I'm going to find her, but I guess I could ask if Eleanor – "

Simone's hand clamping over Wallace's mouth cut him off as he grabbed him with her other hand and pulled him from the couch. "Come with me," she declared as she pulled him toward the steps.

"Mila!" Wallace said, calling his litleo from under a table, away from her art project of tearing the straw into pieces.

"Ben, we'll be back!" Simone said, waving over her head as she ran from the lounge.

Wallace glanced back and found Ben standing in front of the coffee shop with a danish in each hand, mouth agape, as he and Mila left.

Following Simone's brisk pace across the lobby and past a resident door took Wallace up several flight of stairs and through a hall lined with dark doors to room 355 where Simone twisted a key into the door's lock. "Do you live here?" he asked. His eyes darted from wall to wall, finding each decorated with bulletin boards and posters all in tones of pinks and purples, and guessed it was a girl's hall.

"Yeah," Simone said as she turned the knob, but rather than open the door she stepped back and kicked it in.

Wallace jolted back as the wooden door slammed against brick. Simone charged in, unfazed by her own brash behavior, her entrance into the room earning a scream from inside.

Easing his way around the doorframe, Wallace found the interior of the room to be narrower than his own room and scarcely decorated. As his head cleared the door, Wallace reared back as a boy, buttoning his shirt and trying to get his shoes on at the same time came bolting out at him. Wallace pressed himself to the wall as the boy slid on the floor, his socks sending him flying forward and landing with a splat on the floor.

As he watched the boy get his bearings and run like his life depended on it, Wallace moved back into the doorway and found Simone standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips. In front of her, on a bed decorated in earth colors was Willow, attempting to smooth strands of her hair.

Willow scoffed and clawed at her hair, taming stands of her white-blonde hair back into place as Wallace put two and two together as to what Simone had just interrupted. "What is your problem?" Willow yelled, slamming her fists into her mattress.

In one swift motion, Simone swiped at Willow and gripped a handful of her hair, yanking her from the bed. Wallace went wide eyes as Willow screamed and Simone dragged her to the door and pulled to her feet. Willow clawed at Simone's wrist as Simone slammed her against the door, the wood knocking against brick again as Simone pinned Willow with a forearm against her throat.

"Start talking, Orphan," Simone growled.

Willow fought against Simone's hold like a wild pokémon caught in a trap. Her legs kicked, knocking against the door and her hands clawed at Simone's arm in an attempt to pry it away. When all attempts at her freedom were fruitless Willow's startled expression turned into panic, her eyes wide and glossy, her mouth flapping open as she sputtered for a breath. "Wh – Why are you – Wallace! Wallace, help me, please!"

"Wallace, stay where you are," Simone said, adjusting her stance.

Wallace gripped the doorframe and did as Simone suggested and watched in amazement as Simone's smaller build kept Willow in place. The muscles in Simone's arm rippled under her skin as she showed no sign of surrendering to Willow's struggle.

"If you want me to let go you're going to have a talk with us," Simone said, smacking away Willow's clawing hand. "I want answers on the Orphans. I want to know everything."

"I would never hu – hurt you!" Willow whined, her eyes pinching shut as Simone moved her arm up higher on her throat. "I promise! You weren't in danger!"

Simone's throaty laugh brought chills to the nape of Wallace's neck. "Girl, you and I are roommates, if one of us was ever in danger here it's you. Let me tell you something. I ended last year at the top of our class because my team is so far ahead of everyone else's and I'll tell you how they got there."

Simone removed her arm and Willow slacked against the wall for a moment until he fell, crumpled at Simone's feet. Wallace breathed a sigh of relief, thinking Simone might let her prey go, but as Willow coughed and sucked in air, that thought shattered as Simone grabbed the back of her blouse and spun her, slamming her back against the door.

"I wasn't always so nice," Simone breathed into Willow's ear, though her hissing voice seemed to reverberate through the hall and bring more chills to Wallace. "I used to push my pokémon to their limits, working them to the point of exhaustion. Refusing to feed them if they messed up, neglecting them for days if they upset me. I abused them and the people around me. I'm better now, but ask yourself, if I would go to those lengths to get what I want from pokémon that are near and dear to my heart. What will I do to a girl I don't even know who works for a crew of psychotic parentless freaks?"

Wallace's grip on the doorframe loosened as his palms became slick, his pulse quickening and his view of the scene in front of him blurring. He swallowed hard at the edge in Simone's voice, knowing everything she said had to be the truth by the conviction in her tone.

"I'm not scared of you or your friends and there is no danger except the one sleeping ten feet away from your bed," Simone growled. "I am the danger and the danger wants answers, are you going to talk or do I have to get creative?"

"I'll cooperate," Willow cried.

Simone pulled back from Willow and the girl came flying off the wall, her legs kicking out as she fell and landed at Simone's feet again. She scrambled across the floor and half-ran half-crawled to Wallace, clawing his legs to embrace him in a hug.

"Oh don't hug him and act all innocent and scared, no one's buying it," Simone said, pulling their door shut. "Let's go find someplace public to talk. At least if there are witnesses I won't be tempted to put my hands on you again."

Willow clutched Wallace's shirt and moved behind him. "I want to talk to Wallace, alone."

"No." Simone crossed her arms, her muscles flexing in the process. "Not going to happen. In fact, you're lucky if I ever let you out of my sight again. I know we have lots of classes together and I'll even rearrange my training schedule to eat all my meals with you. I'll sit in the corner when you want to bring your boy toys around and if you have to pee I'll be there to make sure you wash your hands."

Wallace studied Willow's freckles until he found her light eyes staring back at him. She shook her head to him and then she ran. She tore off from Wallace and darted through the hall, her legs pumping faster than he thought she could run. But as fast as Willow was, Simone was faster.

Simone shot from the wall and flicked her arm out. Like a professional at their sport, a ball soared through the hall, passing Willow and crashing against the far wall. The ball broke open and Simone's typhlosion burst onto the scene, its paws stomping against the tile. The beige and dark fur bristled as it stood on two of its legs and with a roar a mane of fire erupted from its back. Willow slid to a stop in front of the fire-type, losing her balance and crashing to the floor in its shadow.

Willow gasped as she rolled over and started to crawl, but rather than run she tossed a ball of her own out and a seviper emerged. Its wriggling and dark scaled body slammed onto the floor, hissing and flicking its bladed tail at the towering typhlosion. "Poison fang!"

The seviper's body coiled as it slinked across the hall and launched at typhlosion, its head mere inches from connecting with the fire-type's body underbelly.

"Use thunderpunch," Simone said.

Typhlosion roared again and charged the seviper, it rammed into the serpent, knocking it off balance and sending it wriggling across the floor to regain control. But as seviper righted itself, typhlosion reared back and delivered a charged blow to its head.

Wallace felt himself cringe as the impact seemed to rattle the seviper's head, its body going limp for a moment. Without waiting for Simone's command, typhlosion leaned over seviper and bit into it, dragging the serpent along the hall as he lumbered toward Simone.

Wallace and Mila backed away with slow steps as typhlosion passed him and he noticed one the fire-type's vacant eye sockets, the area marred with scars of missing fur. Typhlosion dropped the wriggling seviper at Simone's feet as Willow came charging back into the hall.

"Polonium!" she gasped. "Wrap around!""

The seviper coming back to life startled Wallace who collapsed against a door as the seviper's body slid under typhlosion and it began to coil, its body encasing typhlosion in a matter of seconds. Typhlosion cried out as seviper brought it to the ground, its massive coils tightening around its opponent's body.

Wallace's eyes flicked from typhlosion, its mouth gaping open and its remaining eye bulging out, to Simone who looked unbothered by her pokémon's pain.

"Smokescreen," Simone said, crouching to eye level with her pokémon.

Typhlosion managed to flip onto its back, rolling seviper with it and closed its mouth, its cheeks puffy out before it spat a small black ball at seviper's face. The poison-type hissed at the ball connected and exploded like a bomb of powder.

Flecks of black dust filled the air as the hall became cloudy with black smoke that gagged Wallace. At the opposite end of the hall he heard Willow gagging, but seviper's hissing drew his attention back in as the sounds of struggle came from the center of the smokescreen.

Wallace grabbed Mila and backed away, hacking on smoke that seemed unescapable, as the sounds of the struggle drew nearer, the bodies of the battling pokémon flopping against the tile as neither seemed willing to surrender. As he cleared the smoke a blaring alarm exploded from the ceiling.

A strobe of white lights flashed every few seconds as doors in the hall flung open, girls flooding out and screaming at the sight of black smoke.

"Oh my god, it's a fire!"

"There's actually smoke, we're gonna die!"

"Get out of the way!"

Wallace flattened himself against the wall as a stampede started as girl ran from their rooms and filled the hall, clogging the hall as the battle raged on. He watched the crowd become congested as girls screamed and started to fall onto the floor, tripping over the unseen pokémon wrestling on the floor.

Wallace covered his mouth and held Mila close as he walked away from the crowd to the end of the hall and found another stairwell. He hacked on smoke as he climbed down the stairs, letting Mila down as they neared the ground floor.

The lingering smoke effects lasted until he was outside, a crowd of students gathered at the back of the building as they pointed at a window on the third floor where black smoke wafted out.

"It's always something."

Waving off imaginary smoke, turned to find Carl and the chunky metallic body of a lairon coming from the path behind him, eyes turned to the smoking building.

The area behind him brought Wallace back to the previous night. Beyond Carl was a small overhang and the alley between two buildings he'd hidden in with his box of clothes until they went missing. He looked over the space he stood in, an outdoor classroom patio with benches arranged in a circle on a path that led either to his dorm hall or the open space between buildings, anyone could have grabbed the box and vanished in seconds.

"How's it's going?" Carl asked, casting his eyes onto Wallace. "You look different, kind of like me."

Wallace had to admit his hair did look similar to Carl's wavy light blonde locks, though the boy had a few inches on him and a scar along his face that made him pretty distinct. "Yeah," he said, dryly, unsure of how he wanted to respond to anyone anymore without knowing if they wanted to be his friend or to torment him for his past.

"What's going on in there?" Carl asked, nodding to the building. "Is it a fire?"

"No. A battle got out of control," Wallace said, turning from attention away from Carl, not sure if he should hold eye contact or not.

"I didn't know fighting in the dorms was allowed," Carl said, folding his arms over his chest. "So, what are you up to?" he asked, dropping his hands on his hips as he squinted at Wallace.

"Me?" he asked, dumbly, turning to Carl. Out of the former classmates Wallace could run into, Carl seemed the most wholesome so he chose to take Carls' invitation and run with it. "Nothing, just trying to figure something out." He sighed with every word, realizing he'd left Willow and Simone to tear each other apart, though he hoped Willow was smart enough to use the fire alarm to escape. With any luck Willow would live long enough to request a room change. As much as he wanted answers, Simone's way of getting them seemed extreme.

"Something important?" Carl asked, leaning over into Wallace's line of sight.

"I'm trying to do the right thing, for once," he said, sighing again as the idea of how insurmountable that task seemed. I think I'm gonna go for a walk," he said, nodding to Carl as he moved past him and headed toward the alley. He passed the two buildings and started off down the pathway when he heard metallic stomps behind him. Tossing a glance over his shoulder he saw Carl and lairon following him.

"Can I show you something?" Carl asked, picking up his pace to come to Wallace's side. "If you don't mind."

"Uh sure," Wallace said, his shoulders jumping as Carl took the lead and guided him across the paths and toward the Origin Center.

The boys made small talk concerning the weather, the upcoming year, and their summers, and as they rounded the stadium and crossed from a stone path to the sand of the beach. During their walk, Wallace found himself opening up more as none of Carl's answers or questions were toward his lies or his actions last year.

Carl buried the tops of his shoes in the beach and stepped out of them, snatching his socks off as he moved to the water's edge. Wallace did the same, ridding himself of his socks and shoes as Carl's lairon, a large reflective surface for the morning sun lumbered across the sand. Mila dug her paws into the sand and took off, trotting across the beach, her paws kicking up shoots of sand as she kept her distance from the lapping water the shore.

"You come here often?" Wallace asked as he made slow steps to toward the water.

"Every day since I came back to campus," Carl said, using his hand as a visor to block the sun.

Wallace nodded as he came to Carl's side and watched the shifting surface of the water, reflecting globs of sunlight across the ever shifting tide. He expected Alexia's mermaid to break the surface at some point and for Carl to point with hyper enthusiasm and exclaim that mermaids did exist. When Wallace didn't say anything Carl shrugged and lowered his hand.

"She's be here soon, she's never late," he said.

Silence, punctuated by waves kissing the shore, stretched between them. Lairon watched Mila run laps around it as Carl bounced on the balls of his feet and Wallace turned his focus on a fleet of wingull when the sound of something cutting across the bay drew his eyes to the water.

Something wide and blue broke the surface of the water, crossing from the horizon toward the campus beach. Carl smiled and swung his arm up, pointing lazily at the water. Wallace stood in silence as whatever it was drew nearer, his vision able to make out the sight of a woman coming toward them across the sea. A chariot of blue skin carried her across the sea, melding into the colors of the water and giving the woman an almost otherworldly look as if she floated on the waves themselves.

In snapshot moments in Wallace's mind, he made out small details of the woman as she came closer. She was old, her skin sagged and creased with age, her hair wispy strands of grey and white that fell down her back. Her legs lay folded to her side under a billowing floral dress. She hadn't rode the waves to them, an enormous blue pokémon carried her close enough to them on the shore that Wallace could see a missing tooth as she smiled.

"Hi Carl!"

Her wizened voice barely made it above the sound of the waves as she raised a frail looking arm and waved.

"Hi Mrs. Smith!" Carl shouted back, cupping his mouth.

"Oh, did you bring a friend today?" Mrs. Smith said, her words coming out slow and shaky, but kind and in an almost unexplainable way, welcoming.

"Yes ma'am, his name is Wallace," Carl said back, grabbing Wallace's shoulder and ushering him forward.

Wallace took a few steps into the moist sand, the waves covering his ankles as they touched the shore. "Hi," he said with a short wave.

"It's nice to meet you!" Mrs. Smith said as she leaned forward and rubbed a circle onto the back of her pokémon escort.

A small indentation on the pokémon's back exploded with a gush of water and air that shot high into the air, showering the elderly woman, though she didn't seem to mind as she laughed and clapped her hands.

"Ba'ul says hi back to you!" Mrs. Smith lowered herself to the back of the pokémon and seemed to hug its massive body as it emerged from the water, a beady eye, small, compared to the size of its body staring back at Wallace from the sea.

"I can't believe you come out here to see an old girl like me, Carl," Mrs. Smith said. "Don't you have something better to do?"

"No ma'am," Carl said, shaking his head. "I wouldn't miss you and wailord for anything."

Wallace watched the woman cup her hands to her chest and nod her head as her wailord began to lower itself back into the sea, the water covering its body until just an oval of its skin remained above the water where Mrs. Smith sat.

"Some day I'll have to come to shore and you can take me on a tour," she said, smiling again.

"My lairon would be more than happy to let you ride on its back," Carl said, gesturing to lairon who snorted and bobbed its head. "Maybe I'll swim with you someday."

"That would make me very happy," Mrs. Smith said as she pat Ba'ul's back. "I better get going, I have to make it home before it gets too late or my poor husband will starve. Bye Carl, bye Carl's friend!"

Wallace and Carl waved off the woman as she and wailord made a slow turn in the water and cut across the sea the same way they came. It wasn't until she vanished on the horizon that Carl stopped waving and smiled at the scenery.

"That's what you wanted me to see?" Wallace asked.

Carl smiled and nodded his head, turning his eyes to the sand. "I was out here one day on a walk and I saw her. I thought she was amazing, riding across the sea on the back of a wailord. How cool is that?"

"Pretty cool," Wallace answered, somewhat surprised at Carl's excitement.

"She comes here everyday," Carl said as he turned from the water and headed back up the beach. "She rides her husband's wailord all the way from her home in Ambrette Town up the coast to stop by campus, then she rides back."

Wallace gawked at the idea of making such a trip once, let alone everyday. "Every single day, what about the weather? Or if it storms?"

"I don't know, I've only been seeing her for a week, but she said she hasn't missed a day since in five years," Carl said. "It's what keeps her going."

"What's so special about coming here?"

"She said she her husband here when they were students," Carl said as he scooped up his shoes, but didn't bother putting them on. "And riding on his wailord's back was one of their favorite things to do together."

"So why don't they come out together?" Wallace followed Carl's lead and carried his shoes as he stepped back onto the path and the two of them headed back to campus, their pokémon trailing after them.

Carl sucked in a breath through his teeth and took Wallace's question with a frown. "He passed away five years ago. I looked them up in the school's alumni registry and he'd died from a stroke. I think Mrs. Smith got into the habit of coming out here, but maybe forgets sometimes that her husband is gone. I think at some point during the trip she knows, and that's why she sets out with his wailord, but maybe making it to campus she's forgotten again."

Wallace's feet slowed to a stop on the stone path, the realization that Mrs. Smith makes it home to an empty house after anticipating returning to her husband all but paralyzing him in place. The thought darkened his mind and cast the encounter he'd just had in a different light.

"It's okay though," Carl said, pausing ahead of him on the path. "When I see her tomorrow she won't remember or seem sad that her husband is gone. In a way, it's kind of perfect. She gets to remember him, but the realization of his death never stops her from riding out here."

"But when she gets home the truth hits her," Wallace said, stressing the point with his tone.

Carl shrugged and cocked his lips up into a half-frown. "Or maybe on the way back she remembers as smoothly as she forgets and it's not as jarring as we think. Maybe she slips in and out of her delusion without it hurting her. I'd like to think that."

"But – "

"I think I was wrong about you," Carl said.

Wallace's protest against Mrs. Smith's mental state clogged in his throat as Carl turned to him. His notions about Carl not judging him flew out the window of his mind in an instant as he readied himself for Carl to dismiss him and possibly blame him for a random occurrence on campus during his absence.

"I think that... No matter how good people are at lying, or maybe hiding who they are, the truth of us all comes out when we don't expect it to," Carl said. "I think I've always been on the fence about you. Torn between the rumors and what I saw, not sure which to trust. But I don't think you're a bad person, no matter what people say."

What rebuttal Wallace might have had dried up on his tongue as his face burned and he turned away from Carl. Another stretch of silence passed between them as lairon made its slow gait past Wallace to Carl's side. From the corner of his vision, Wallace saw Carl staring at him before he shrugged and started walking.

"Noon," Carl said with a wave over his head.

"What?"

"Mrs. Smith, she comes at noon," he replied.

Once Carl was out of sight, Wallace started walking with Mila. Outside his building he saw several adults gathered around a horde of squirtle, all of whom seemed to be inspecting the building. Knowing he should check on his team, he crossed towardthe ICO, the roses of Bellerose Courtyard in the corner of his vision.

Mila trotted away from him as he walked the perimeter of the Courtyard. The litleo leaped over the rock boundaries pouncing around in the dirt as she swatted at a rose and started a pack of budew hiding amongst the grasses. Wallace watched the grass-types run out of the rose bushes, Mila hot in pursuit until a roserade appeared in her path.

The roserade aimed one of its flowered hands at Mila, though the litleo didn't take it as a threat. Mila swatted the rose and rolled to the ground, showing her belly to the roserade.

"Wild pokémon chasing off the budew again? I can't deal with this, I need some repels."

Wallace came around the edge of the Courtyard to find a large group of children walking down from the steps of the ICO. His attention shifted from the young trainers to Mila and the roserade, his breath catching his throat as he took note of the discolored petals on roserade's hands.

"Atropa?" he asked, half hoping the pokémon wouldn't respond to his call, but it did.

The roserade shifted its position, turning its outstretched stem from Mila to Wallace as it batted its eyes at him. Atropa crossed an arm over its chest and did a small curtesy at him before it pointed to Mila and then to him.

"Yeah, she's mine," Wallace said, crouching and opening his arms as Mila slid off the ground and ran to him, collapsing at his feet.

The sound of enthusiastic young voices had Wallace inching around the Courtyard to find over a dozen children standing in front of the ICO, all their faces splitting with wide grins as they listened to someone giving instructions out of sight.

"Alright, follow me, we're heading to the beach next, Atropa, we're leaving!" the voice issuing instructions said.

Wallace watched Atropa walk away, the horde of budew following quickly after it as they joined the pokémon belonging to the children.

"Don?" Wallace called out, recognizing the voice of the guide. With hurried steps he moved into the open space of the Courtyard, though the boy wasn't in sight. "Don?" he asked again, moving faster to see through the crowd and the trees as the children moved out of the Courtyard and out of sight. "Don!"

"Donnie, someone is calling for you!" a small girl with two white braids in her hair said as she separated herself from the pack.

Wallace stared at her for a moment, feeling like he'd seen her before as she stared back at him with blue eyes that held a stare as fierce and intimidating as a dragon's. Something about her face transfixed Wallace, maybe it was her eyes and her small nose. She wore a knee-length skirt that billowed out and a wrinkled white blouse, she looked like an angel, but as she opened her mouth Wallace knew that wasn't true.

"Who the heck you looking at?!" she snapped, balling her fists at her sides and stomping her foot. "Got a staring problem? I'll fix your face if you don't stop looking at me!" The girl brandished a Poké Ball, though one that was green with dark markings and much bigger than her hand as she yelled at him.

"Lily, stop yelling," Don came running into view and crouched beside the girl, clasping a hand over the Poké Ball.

"This guy is staring!" Lily yelled into Don's ear. "He's lucky you're here or else I'd wipe the floor with him, I'm telling you, I would do it too! Or get my big brothers to do it for me, cause they'd to that too! Big brother, tell him!"

"Nobody is here to fight," Don said, looking away from the girl his eyes scanned the Courtyard until they found Wallace.

In a pair of khakis, a short-sleeved colored shirt and with shorter hair, still the color of an ink drop, Wallace felt like Don had matured years since their last encounter. Like Azalea, something seemed to be missing, a glow or livelihood appeared to be missing from Don's normally bright demeanor.

"Um, Reed?" Don said, breathing hard as he seemed out of breath.

From around the corner came Reed, the boy with the jawline Wallace met yesterday. Reed touched the heads of the kids he passed as he came to Don's side. "What's up?" he asked before he noticed Wallace and waved.

"Can you take the group?" Don asked, his eyes flicking between Reed and wallace. "I just need a minute here."

Reed's mouth curled into a frown as he looked between the boys as well. He nodded and began to corral everyone, swinging his arms like he was directing traffic. "Alright, let's go, we're going to the beach! Whoever finds the most seashells wins a prize, c'mon Lily."

Lily jerked away from Reed's hand and she crossed her arms over her chest. "I'm staying with Donnie, I'm not going anywhere with you!"

Reed's face fell and he scratched the back of his head, leaning over like his spine had turned to jelly for a moment. "Lily, if you keep saying things like that you might begin to hurt my feelings," he said.

"Duh," Lily said, smacking her lips. "That's kind of my whole point." Lily twirled one of her braids before she took to examining her nails.

"It's, it's fine, she can stay with me, we'll be right there," Don said. "I just need a minute."

Wallace watched the kids file down the sidewalk, followed by Reed. Don grabbed Lily's hand and walked her over, stopping several feet from Wallace who wished he'd take just two steps closer.

"Hi," Wallace breathed, his eyes darting to Lily. "Hi, who are you?"

With another smack of her lips the little girl rolled her eyes and looked elsewhere. "Lily Freelily."

Wallace glanced to Don, who he found staring back, but he turned his attention back to Lily when Don's hard stare became too much to focus on. "It's nice to meet you," he said, softly.

"Yup," Lily said. "The pleasure is all yours. Donnie, can we go now? This guy is boring."

"In a minute," Don said, shaking Lily's hand.

"Don," Wallace said, the name holding different weight as the holder of it stood in front of him. "It's good to see you."

Don's eyes closed partially and the corner of his mouth twitched. "Wallace, you – "

"Wallace?" Lily blurted out. "This is Wallace?" she asked, cupping her chin and narrowing her eyes on him. "Uh huh, I see, I see, I see. Very interesting." The girl covered her mouth as she giggled and prodded Don's leg. "Donnie, is this _the_ Wallace? Like boo-hoo crying into your pillow, Wallace? And the same Wallace from when you lock the door and disappear for an hour in your room, Wallace?"

Lily's remarks set Wallace's face on fire as Don shook the girl's arm hard enough to jerk her around, though she didn't seem to care. She bit her lip to hold back her snickers and cast her eyes elsewhere.

"I'll take that as a yes," Lily whispered.

Wallace knew with Lily in the mix, the kind of conversation he needed wasn't possible at the moment. "Don, I know you're busy, you're on a tour, but um – if we could, could we talk? I really need umm, I really need to talk to you. I'm living in – "

"Wallace," Don said, cutting him off as he shook his head. He pulled on Lily's hand and turned her toward the path to the beach. "You shouldn't have come back."

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Eight


	38. The NRR

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Eight – The NRR**

 _All our ignorance brings us closer to death – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

With the day's rejections clouding and consuming Wallace's thoughts, he spent the rest of Saturday in the campus library pouring over school records. He started with the student-made archives detailing the lives of alumni post-graduation until he found Sylvia Smith née Brown, the lady Carl introduced him to on the beach, and her husband Maxwell. He found Maxwell's death cataloged with newspaper clippings in another tome, his life coming to an end at the ripe of 86. Following his reading of a service held on campus for Maxwell, Wallace flipped to the back of the book and found dozens of blank pages, a grim thought penetrating his mind that future deaths would fill the pages in the years to come. Rather than put the book back, Wallace thumbed his way back until he found a news article regarding the safari.

 _ **Annual University Safari Expedition Leaves Several Students Injured, One Dead**_

 _COUMARINE — One student of Radix University's freshman class is dead, several others were rushed to the Health and Wellness Center on campus following what was supposed to be a welcoming event for new students, sponsored and hosted by Radix University._

 _The deceased is Dirk Underwood, 18, of Castelia, Unova. According to authorities, Underwood paired with fellow students upon entering the safari islands, located in Azure Bay and ventured to a thought-to-be abandoned mansion, known as The Haven and was attacked on Saturday afternoon._

 _According to Officer Beau Chatman of the Coumarine Police, Underwood, along with classmates Eleanor Ampora, Simone Mallory, Wallace Peters, and Ben Rider came into contact with an individual known as Chara. Under the pretense of being a classmate of theirs, while assuming a different identity, Chara lured students to The Haven. Officer Chatman stated he: "[believe] Chara had the intent to kill the students they lured into the mansion"._

 _Ampora and Peters survived a chase from the mansion by Chara and were able to get their classmates to a safe location and alert others to the attacks before the pair lost consciousness from what is believed to be their injuries. Ampora suffered a severe wound to her face while Peters suffered numerous deep lacerations to his back._

 _The Radix Department of Public Safety arrived shortly after Ampora and Peters were confirmed safe and performed a search of the mansion and the surrounding island. Underwood's body was recovered. Chara was not located._

 _The four students involved in the attack were taken in for treatment and are believed to be in stable condition. The University has issued a statement regarding the immediate closure of the safari islands, prohibiting its students from venturing to any of the surrounding islands as a search for Chara is underway._

He stayed in the library until the sun fell on campus and Mila drifted off to sleep on the table. He replaced the books into their shelves and made his way to his dorm, heading to his room without a word, even ignoring Nicki's probing questions of his whereabouts as he climbed into bed.

He planned on getting a few minutes of shut eye, he needed to make a trip to the beach for his bath, but his waking eyes found a pale violet sky, the world on the verge of a new day. Mindful of his team, and Nicki, Wallace left his room to venture through the building toward what he'd come to refer to as his bathroom, the one in the basement with a solid lock on the door.

His flip-flops slapped his heels, echoing a whacking sound through the silent halls as he left the second floor and headed for the stairwell to the lower levels. With a hand in his pocket, fiddling with spinarak's ball, Wallace ran a hand along the railing, but paused at a clicking sound followed by a circle of light shining against the stone walls.

Mindful to keep his feet to the ground to avoid his choice of footwear giving him away, Wallace peered around the stairwell. On the first floor landing below him he saw Eleanor swathed in a yellow robe, the baby pink fabric of shorts poking out from the front opening. Two tall men in coveralls stood at her sides, flashlights illuminating the stairwell.

One of the men opened the door to the first floor halls and revealed a wall of darkness on the other side. "We checked the individual lights and outlets, I think it's a problem with the switches."

"Okay," Eleanor said, sounding sedated as if she'd woken suddenly. Bobbing her head, Eleanor yawned and let her eyes droop close for a moment as she crossed her arms over her chest.

"I'm guessing the main fuse box in is the basement?" the other man said, turning his light away from the walls and toward the rest of the stairwell that curled beneath them toward the basement.

"Yeah, I'll show you." Eleanor kept her arms crossed over her chest as she led the two men across the landing and out of Wallace's sight.

He listened to their descending footsteps and moved with muted footfalls down the steps and paused on the landing. He propped open the first floor door with his foot and stared into the abyss of darkness in front of him. A lone light, the red EXIT sign at the end of the hall, was all he could find and cast a shallow rust tint over the edge of the hall. A shroud of black concealed everything between his spot and the point of escape.

A scratching sound had Wallace moving away from the wooden door to a metal one across the landing from him that led outside. He cupped his hands to the panel of glass in the door and peered out into what looked like a storm. Though he hadn't heard it, the campus seemed to be in the middle of a light downpour and winds that had the tree limbs bending and scraping the building.

As he contemplated going back to bed, he could pee once the apparent power outage was over, a scream from the floor below him kept him from heading back up the steps. The way it pierced the air coming from the basement, Wallace knew it was a girl's scream, Eleanor's.

He threw himself across the landing, but wavered at the edge of another staircase. An overhead bulb usually lit the steps to the basement, but the lack of power left the descending steps in front of him dripped in darkness. The wan light from outside illuminated a few inches in front of Wallace, but not enough to show him the step below him.

His hands groped through the air at his sides, his right hand clawing madly at nothing, but his left hand eventually hit a railing. He clenched the railing for dear life as he readied himself to take a step, but as his foot hovered over what he hoped was a step and not open air, the sound of a door smacking the wall below caused him to recoil back.

Wallace couldn't retreat fast enough as the sound of thundering of footsteps echoed from below and filled his thoughts as one of the men in overalls burst from the darkness. Wallace gasped as he locked eyes with the man. They were too close and the man was moving too fast to avoid, the two collided with Wallace slamming into the wall as the man barreled over him.

Rips and shreds covered the man's overalls and in the gasps in the fabric Wallace could see his flesh, torn and bleeding through the material. The man collapsed on the landing, Eleanor cradled in his arms. Wallace watched as he laid her Eleanor on the ground, her eyes closed and hair tousled as if something had smacked the side of her head.

"Boy, go call someone!"

Wallace tore his eyes from Eleanor at the last second, waiting until he saw her chest inflate with air. "What?" he asked, unable to process the panic in the man's voice or his thousand-yard stare until something grabbed him.

The man yelped as something yanked his lips from under him and his chest smacked the floor. His head bounced against the cement floor as something pulled him back, dragging him into the darkness and down the steps to the basement.

Wallace threw himself toward the man, his hands fumbling to grasp the man's arms or hands. "Hold on!" he yelled, a pointless sentiment as he managed to hold onto the edge of the man's sleeve for a fraction of a second. Wallace perched on the edge of the step as he watched the man's pleading and fearful face become swallowed by the darkness. He watched the black hole in front of him in silence as he heard the man's body dragging over every step until he hit the ground floor. The sound of the man's uniform scratching over the smooth stone floor faded in a matter of seconds.

"No! Stop it – ahh! Help! Pleeee –"

A bellowing cackle interrupted the man's cry for help before a whooshing din seemed to swallow every sound. In the seconds that followed, Wallace found himself to terrified to moveI as he looked to Eleanor and found spots of what had to be blood darkening her robe.

He stayed crouched at the top of the stairs as his thighs began to scream at him. Taking the time to breathe, the sound of his breaths filling the stairwell, he found the strength to move. He stood and stepped over Eleanor, dragging his hands over the walls until he found a small protrusion. He pressed his body to the wall and ran his hands over the object, familiarizing himself with its features as if the gift of sight eluded him until he was sure he'd found the fire alarm.

Latching his fingers onto the lever, Wallace cried out as he pulled as hard as he could, sure he might break it. When no blaring sound rang out and the flash of strobes didn't start, he thought he might actually have broken it. He pulled on the lever again only for the front of the alarm to pop off the wall. Wallace moved toward the door and held his hands out to the window like an offering as the fleeting moonlight lit up a mess of red plastic and severed wiring in his hands.

The shudder of Wallace's breath filled the stairwell again as he turned his hands over and let the ruined alarm clatter to the floor. With his eyes on the dark maw, Wallace grabbed Eleanor under her arms and pulled her away from the steps. Just a few feet away something rolled out from under Eleanor's body, a cylindrical blob in the darkness that reflected the moonlight.

After propping Eleanor against the wall, Wallace grabbed the object and immediately felt around for a switch. Clicking it on, a beam of light lit up the blue painted walls around him. Immediately, Wallace turned the flashlight toward the steps, spilling light over the stairs and illuminating streaks and splotches of blood that trailed all the way to the ground floor where it vanished under the door.

With a shaky hand, Wallace held the flashlight between his purlicue and gripped the railing with his other fingers as he pulled spinarak's ball from his pocket. He trained the light on one of the walls as he released spinarak and the dual-type skittered across the painted brick.

"F-Follow me," Wallace said, unable to keep his voice or limbs steady as he took a shaky step down. With every step toward the basement, Wallace flicked the flashlight from the stairs, mindful to avoid the bloodstains, to the wooden door that waited ahead of him, silently praying nothing opened the door from the other side while he wasn't watching it.

As he reached the bottom, Wallace turned the flashlight back up the steps. The trip to the first floor seeming much further away than the trip down. As he focused on the tip of Eleanor's slippered foot he considered leaving the basement and waking the entire building, or at the very least getting elgyem, but the thought of the two men had Wallace reaching for the doorknob.

The door opened without a sound and spinarak wasted no time in leaving the stairwell behind and climbing over the threshold into a long hallway. Without the aid of moonlight, the hall Wallace stepped into seemed a degree darker than the stairwell and the shadows even more suspicious as he cast the light in every direction.

The hall stretched off to his left into a corridor lined with rooms. To his right sat a door labeled by a plastic plaque that identified it as the laundry room. Opposite from the laundry room was another hall, one lined with doors. Unsure of which direction to take Wallace kept turning the light down each of the halls until spinarak's clicking drew his attention to the ground.

Splotches of blood created a clear trail from the stairwell door to the laundry room and as he dragged the light up from the bottom of the door Wallace found bloodied handprints stained on the painted door.

Spinarak climbed the door as Wallace reached for the knob and threw his weight onto the door, forcing it open and whipping the flashlight around inside. In a moment of forgetfulness, he tried the light switch, the clicking of the dead switch echoing around the box of a room.

Rows of dryers sat along three of the walls while washing machines sat stacked across the room, but other than the laundry equipment, Wallace found nothing out of order until he turned his attention to the floor. The blood trails that led him to the basement continued toward the center of the room before they stopped abruptly.

The light red streaks, the darker splotches, and even the small driblets of blood that left a metallic tang in the air cut off in the middle of the room with no explanation. On the other side of the room, beside a standalone drying machine was the only other exit. Wallace pressed his hands to the bar on the door and pushed the heavy door open to reveal a short flight of steps that led outside.

He climbed to the top, casting the light on the stone below him, hoping to find a trace of blood, but by the time he found himself standing outside the dorm he'd found nothing. In the distance he could see the start of the sunrise spilling over the far end of the campus.

"Hey."

A voice in his blindspot and a hand touching his shoulder sent a jolting shiver up Wallace's spine and he whirled around, his fist curling up and connecting with something behind him.

"Ow!"

Breathing hard and fumbling with the flashlight that felt like it was suddenly made of slime, Wallace tried to focus the light on a figure stumbling away from him, crunched over and half of an average person's height. Wallace gripped the light with both hands and illuminated Nicki standing by stairwell door hands clasped to their cheek.

"What the hell is your problem?" Nicki yelled, their voice taking on an unfamiliar bass.

"What?" Wallace asked, his voice a grating hiss as he struggled to breathe.

A flash of colors lit up the inside of the stairwell and Nicki straightened up as the door opened. Using their phone as a light, Nicki lit up elgyem who floated through the doorway and immediately glided to Wallace. "Gy?"

Wallace let out a sigh of relief and rubbed heads with elgyem while spinarak began to climb his pant leg, the teammates coming together on his shoulders to communicate in their language.

"I need a new roommate, I knew this wasn't going to work," Nicki said, still cupping their cheek as they made a sweeping motion with their phone, casting a less bright version of the torch's light around outside of the building. "What are you doing out here?

"I'm sorry," Wallace said. He looked to his throbbing knuckles. "I didn't know who you were, you scared me. I thought you might be – someone else," he said, peering down the steps that led to the laundry room. He had to wonder what exactly had grabbed the man in the overalls and where they all went.

"No, my roommate doesn't beat me, I just ran into a wall," Nicki said, patting their cheek. "I woke up for a drink and you were gone, but elgyem was still around, figured something juicy was going down. I saw Eleanor on the stairs when I went looking for you. Just wanted to make sure you were okay. Last time I do something nice for you."

Wallace let silence fill the space between them before Nicki flashed their ID and went back inside. Wallace lingered outside for a moment before Nicki began tapping their nails on the door, their impatience showing. Inside, he stared at Eleanor, the girl no longer propped against the wall where he left her, instead she sat on the stairs, something about her appearance in her pink shorts and yellow tank top bothering him.

"Nicki, did you see the blood?" Wallace asked, flicking the flashlight toward the basement. "Use your phone to call public safety."

"Blood?" Nicki asked, his eyes flicking to Eleanor. "Somebody need a tampon?"

Wallace suppressed the urge to roll his eyes as he focused the light on the basement steps. "Look," he said, but gaped at the sight of the steps, void of any blood.

"What am I looking at?" Nicki asked, coming to Wallace's side. "It's just the stairs."

Wallace took several steps toward the basement and cast the light up and down the steps until he reached the basement floor and flung the door open. The hallway was just as it'd been minutes ago, only the blood trail was gone. "There was blood here, e-everywhere," he said, waving his arms in circles over the floor.

"What?" Nicki asked, cocking out their hip.

"There were two guys here, with Ellie, I think they worked here, they were trying to fix the blackout," Wallace said. "They came down here and one of them was attacked. He brought Ellie up and something grabbed him. There was blood all over the floor!"

"Were they cute?" Nicki asked, twisting a pink strand of hair around their finger.

"Elgyem, do you feel anything?" Wallace said, looking to the psychic-type, ignoring Nicki's retort.

Elgyem touched a hand to his mouth and slowly shook is head, his digits only lighting up dimly. "Elgy, gy."

"I think you were dreaming," Nicki said. "Is this going to be happening often? If so I need to make a mental note not to come looking for you. No midnight rendezvous for you, just trips to the laundry room."

"I wasn't dreaming!" Wallace snapped, rushing up the steps and passing Nicki. He reached out toward the fire alarm, prepared to prove his claim, but his fingers kneaded the air in front of the alarm that seemed to be in perfect working condition as if he'd never ripped it off completely. "This was broken," he said, shaking his head. "I pulled it and it came right off, watch."

Nicki's hand slapped Wallace's out of the way before he could pull the alarm. "Are you out of your mind? It's kind of against the rules to go around pulling fire alarms."

"You don't believe me," Wallace said, studying Nicki's face. "There was blood on the floor, on the steps, on the man. Something attacked him and Ellie – " Wallace paused before he whirled around and ran to Eleanor. He crouched beside her, looking for the blood stains from the man's hands. He lifted her arms and scanned her back of her tank top before it clicked in his mind. Her robe was gone.

"There was a purple robe, she was wearing a purple robe and it had blood on it," he said, looking between her current position and where he knew he'd left her on the stairs. "Someone moved her and took her robe."

"And why would anyone do something so pointless?" Nicki asked, propped against the railing.

"Because of the blood," Wallace answered, all but adding the _duh_. "If you want to remove all the blood you remove anything with the blood on it. Someone was here before we came back inside. Nicki, did you see anyone in the stairwell or in the hall when you came to find me?" Wallace turned the flashlight on and turned it down the hall.

"Uh yeah, it's the day of the safari trip, people are waking up and getting ready. We live in a dorm hall, there are hundreds of people in the building and dozens in this hall," Nicki said, absently waving their hand toward their hall. "You sound paranoid."

"I know what I saw," Wallace said, letting his arms fall limp to his sides, his stare focused on Nicki's eyelids as they feigned a yawn.

"So wake her up," Nicki said, nodding to Eleanor. "If what you're saying happened then she would be the one to ask."

Wallace's eyes flicked to Eleanor, propped against the wall on the middle step with her legs crossed at the ankles. As he sat beside her his first thought was that she looked peaceful. With the fading moonlight spilling in, Chara's scar across her cheek was barely noticeable.

He tried a few gentle tactics at rousing her, pushing her arm, nudging her leg and waving a hand in front of her face while elgyem removed one of her slippers, though none earned a response.

"Oh my god," Nicki groaned, shoving Wallace to the side. "You're hopeless." Nicki squatted beside Eleanor and clapped their hands in front of her face, the smack echoing through the stairwell.

Eleanor sprang to life with a scream that didn't sound human and rolled off the step and into Nicki, sending them both to the ground.

Nicki grumbled as they untangled their limbs from Eleanor and got to their feet, brushing off their nightgown. "I've never met a group of more dramatic people," they sighed.

Eleanor peeled herself from the floor and held her head. "Was I asleep?" she asked, looking from Nicki to Wallace. "How did I get out here?"

"You were here because of the blackout, right?" Wallace asked, holding his hands out for her which she took to pull herself up.

Eleanor bobbed her head, lines of concentration puckering up the small scar on her forehead. "I think so," she said before she glanced to the ceiling and down the dorm hall. "Oh crap, the blackout, I need to flip the switch."

Wallace moved back as Eleanor got to her feet and trounced down the stairs, adjusting her pajamas as she went. "Ellie, wait, the men you were with."

Eleanor paused halfway to the basement and hummed. "Who?"

"Two service workers," Wallace said, wrapping his fingers so tightly around the railing his palm throbbed. He hadn't imagined it, the men, their blood, it was real. "They were here to fix the blackout, you came down here with them."

Eleanor cocked her head to the side before her mixed brown locks bounced as she shook her head. "I remember feeling hot and it was because the power went out and turned my fan off, so I got out of bed to turn the switch back on," she said. "I didn't call maintenance, no point in pulling them away from their late night jobs for something so simple. I'll be back, I need to get the lights back on."

Wallace felt his knees go weak with each step Eleanor took to the basement before she vanished behind the door. Silence filled the stairwell for just a second before Nicki's voice startled him.

"Well there goes your eye witness," Nicki said. "Like I said, you were dreaming. I'm going back to bed to try and salvage what I can of my beauty sleep, try not to wake me up with anymore of your crazy antics."

Wallace let his legs go fully limp under him and propped himself against the wall as he listened to Nicki's footfalls vanish down the hall. He stayed there, only half aware of elgyem's beeping and flashing lights to get his attention. The psychic-type landed on Wallace's shoulder and the two touched heads when his attempts at communication went unanswered.

While he waited for Eleanor to return, Wallace ran through everything from the moment he woke up, for his own sake of not forgetting even a second of the memory. He'd began thinking about finding a list of maintenance employees when the light above the basement door turned on, bathing the stairwell in soft yellow light.

His eyes fell to the steps, but saw none of the blood he hoped for. Eleanor came bounding up the steps minutes later, clapping and beaming with a sense of accomplishment. She dropped him off at his room before blowing him a kiss and skipping down the hall and vanishing into the stairwell.

Despite Nicki's claim of going back to bed, his roommate's face was lit up by their phone as Wallace crawled into bed. He quickly settled into the middle of his bed, his mind replaying every second in that stairwell until the repetition drove him into a deep sleep.

* * *

When he awoke the room was blindingly bright. He rolled to the side of the bed and found his phone half out of sight under his bed. He had four missed texts, one from Andrew and the rest from Eleanor, the latter wanting to make breakfast plans then changing it to a late lunch when her first messages didn't get an answer.

Wallace shot back a text as he gathered his things, trying not to make noise, hoping to avoid Nicki's fury as he left for the beach with elgyem.

Campus sprawled with students attempting to enjoy the last day of their summer vacation prior to the start of classes, but the beach was empty. Elgyem watched over his stuff while Wallace bathed. The water was more welcoming than it was at night, though he couldn't imagine being able to find time in the middle of the day to bathe often. While he bathed and swam laps parallel to the beach, Wallace watched motor boats leaving campus from the docks, all carrying first-years and their guides to the safari.

The memory of his manic swim from the girl with the glaceon carried Wallace out of the water and onto a rock to dry off after dressing. He'd counted over a dozen boats whizzing across the bay when Carl ran out onto the beach from the line of foliage that had become like a shower curtain to Wallace.

"You're back," Carl said, jogging across the beach to Wallace, his head sweeping toward the sea every few steps. "Waiting for Mrs. Smith?"

Wallace narrowed his eyes on Carl then glanced to his phone. They were just a few minutes from noon and despite having spent most of his day yesterday reliving the life of Mrs. Smith and her late husband through newspaper clippings, he'd forgotten about the woman's timely trips back to campus.

"I didn't think I'd finish my run around campus in time," he said, jogging in place as he touched a hand to his wrist. "But she'll be here soon so it's perfect timing."

"Why were you running?" Wallace asked, squinting to watch Carl with the sun in his eyes.

Carl shrugged, his mouth curling down into a frown. "I just like it. You don't?"

"I try not to run unless I'm being chased," Wallace said.

Carl's jogging slowed and his eyes flicked toward Wallace, his frown turning into a small smirk. "You probably get a lot of exercise then, huh?"

Wallace snorted without thought and Carl joined in with a light chuckle. "You have no idea," he said, his eyes watching the reflection of sunlight in patches across the sea.

The boys waited in silence until the wizened woman appeared on the horizon, the blue back of her wailord became easily discernible from the water once Wallace knew what to look for. She came as close to the beach as she could, waving to the boys, pleased to see them again.

She stayed long enough for small talk with Carl, she told them about the dinner she made last night and her leftovers for breakfast. She regaled them with a story of an exciting battle she had yesterday on the way home, and seemed extremely talkative and keen to share the details of her trips with the boys until her demeanor changed and Wallace watched it set in. The thought of her husband at home waiting for his dinner, implanting itself into the meat of her brain.

The false memory changed her into someone more concerned with time. She began to fidget on wailord, looking at the sky and the sun's position in it. After hearing about Carl's morning job she asked the wailord to take her back as fast as it could. The sight of her surfing away saddened Wallace, but Carl seemed unaffected by it, waving at her back until she was nearly out of sight.

Wallace sighed and started to gather his stuff, letting elgyem take charge of his bag of toiletries, the psychic-type pretending to drag the bag along the sand. "Nice to see you again," he said, standing and heading toward the line of trees.

"You're leaving?" Carl asked, his tone urgent as he jogged up the beach to meet Wallace on the path behind the trees.

Wallace nodded as he waited for elgyem to stop dragging the bag and just lift it with his powers. "I'm meeting with Eleanor for lunch, but I want to make a stop first," he said, turning away from campus and heading down the path that would lead him toward the north side of campus.

"Where?" Carl asked, a few steps behind Wallace.

"The Roses' Greenhouse," he said, tossing Carl a look. "You can come if you want, though I didn't think you'd want to."

"Why not?"

"Because we've never hung out if it wasn't by coincidence or accident," Wallace said.

"Maybe we should change that," Carl said. "You know, I was thinking about what you said yesterday, about Mrs. Smith and what she goes through. I did some looking into it and I think she has dementia."

Wallace's brow furrowed at the thought, but he shook his head. "She's too high functioning," he said. "And I don't think her memory would fade in and out so rapidly. That happens with environmental changes, like the sun setting."

"Wouldn't her arrival at the beach be a change in her environment?" Carl asked as they crossed away from the dock and beach toward Myrrh Hall and walked under a connecting bridge between classes.

"Yes, but she doesn't remember her husband the moment she gets to the beach, it happens after, without warning," Wallace said.

"You seem to know a lot about it," Carl said.

Wallace pressed on in silence, but could feel Carl's eyes boring into his back, harder with every step he took. "My grandfather has dementia," he said. "It's not fun, it's hard to talk to him sometimes. Some things you tell him it's like he's hearing it for the first time, other things he gets upset because he can tell we're treating him like a patient, it's not easy."

"Samuel?" Carl asked.

Wallace paused and whirled around to Carl as his grandfather's name came from the boy's mouth so easily.

Carl winced and regarded him with a weak half-smile. "After the truth about who you were came out, everything about your family kind of came out too. I'm sorry."

Wallace kept his eyes on Carl, his gaze never straying from the boy's face, not even when Carl looked away and began to fidget with the buttons on his shirt. The thought that his family's history had been aired and researched on campus made Wallace feel as if he'd never gotten dressed on the beach and instead was roaming campus nude, with every scar and blemish of his family's sorted history open for scrutiny and discussion. "I don't think she has it, Carl, but it doesn't really matter does it?"

Carl didn't answer until the two of them were on the path to the greenhouse when Wallace stopped walking. "I guess not, but it's kind of stuck on my mind," he said as he came to Wallace's side. "This is the greenhouse, isn't it?"

The boys stood yards away from a dark husk of a building attached to the side of Neroli Hall. Where sea green panels of glass once offered glimpses into the lush interior, fossil grey sheets of glasses stood in its place. The brick foundation, charred black, led to peeling and melting plastic and rubber fillers that held the glass in place, some of it melted away, allowing glass to fall which left gaps in the structure's face.

As Wallace and Carl walked the perimeter of the greenhouse they caught glimpses of the interior remains. The plant life inside had burned away, leaving blackened branches and half burned plants behind that had died away at some point. Through one of the lower gaps of missing glass Wallace saw soot and debris coating the walkways inside, the ground dark and dead with no signs of life in sight.

"Is it bad I never come this way?" Carl asked, touching a glass panel and admiring the grime his finger collected. "I never had class on this side of campus last year. Did this place catch fire?"

"Someone set it on fire," Wallace said, dragging his finger across one of the panels. As he walked the edge of the greenhouse he found a familiar panel of glass, one etched with the past cases of the Roses. The most recent being Arlette's case against Azalea.

The clanging sound of the school's bell resonated across the grounds and in the dingy reflection of the greenhouse, Wallace saw Carl jolt in his spot.

"I've got a meeting!" Carl gasped. "I'll see you around, Wallace, maybe we'll have class together tomorrow!"

Wallace watched Carl's reflection turn and run off, but he stayed facing the building as he watched the boy vanish down one of the main walkways. He tried to shake Carl's casual mention of his grandfather, but the boy's earlier jab about running a lot due to being chased stuck in his mind with a new meaning if Carl knew everything Wallace had gone through.

In an attempt to push Carl from his mind, Wallace focused on the greenhouse. As if he'd visited an amusement park after dark, there was nothing for Wallace to do but stare at the greenhouse and let his memories take over. He studied the charred structures inside and tried to imagine the sight of roses and lilies, but the blackened remains made it hard to even conjure such images.

The sound of a door smacking shut brought Wallace out of his daydream of the greenhouse's former glory days as he watched Willow emerge from around the corner, as surprised to see her in one piece as she looked to find him outside.

Willow's eyes widened as she flinched back, one hand grasping at the greenhouse siding while the other clenched a sandwich tightly. "Did you bring her here?"

Wallace's brow furrowed at what would make Willow so jumpy, before the idea of Simone hunting her dawned on him. "No, I haven't seen her all day."

"Thank you," she said, sighing, pressing the sandwich to her chest before she took a healthy bite.

"What were you doing inside?" Wallace asked.

"Eating my lunch," she said, mouth full. "Simone followed me all morning, but I managed to ditch her on the way to the student union. I ran here to hide."

Wallace frowned, the thought of Willow sitting on Serena's throne among the ashes darkening his mind. "I'm sorry about her, I didn't think she'd be so intense."

Willow rubbed her shoulder as she shrugged. "I can't blame her, just wish I wasn't the target of her anger. I barely made it out of the building alive yesterday between her, the smoke, and the stampede of girls in our hall. My seviper is in the clinic."

Wallace winced, but couldn't think of anything helpful to say. "I'm sorry."

Willow waved off the pithy apology as she dropped her sandwich into a nearby trashcan. "What brings you to the ruins of the Roses?"

"Azalea said it burned down," he said, touching the charred glass again. "I had to see it for myself. What happened?"

"I wasn't here when it happened," Willow said. "After you escaped the island, Katherine had us moving things around, hiding things, laying low. She knew the police would be searching the area soon."

Katherine. The name struck a chord in Wallace at the ease of which it rolled off Willow's tongue and the fact her name needed no explanation behind it. "The girl with the glaceon," he said.

Willow's light eyes met Wallace's stare as she nodded. "Her name is Katherine," she said. "She showed up one day last year, claimed to be our new leader. Chara fought back, but she's strong."

Wallace bit at the skin on his lip, his teeth tearing away strips of flesh as he mulled over Katherine's presence and authority over Chara. His front teeth dug into tender flesh, the first hint of blood reaching his tongue when Willow laid a hand on his shoulder.

"I haven't apologized yet, for being there when you were taken," she said. "But it had to be me. They wouldn't let anyone do it alone, but I knew if I let anyone else come they would have done worse to you. I know, that sounds like the worst apology ever, but it's the truth. I was your lesser of two evils."

Wallace nodded and laid a hand over hers'. "I believe you, you helped me escape the mansion. All those restraints, I couldn't have gotten free without you."

Willow nodded, her eyes taking on a darker hue as she separated herself from him and started to pace a line in the walkway. "She's late," she said to her shoes.

"Who?" Wallace asked, his voice shaking as a chill clawed down his spine, could she be waiting for Katherine?

"Serena," Willow said, wiping the corner of her mouth. "She asked me to meet her here around noon. Figured I'd just stay inside the greenhouse all day, I don't think Simone would come looking for me here."

"Yo!"

Willow and Wallace turned their heads to the main path leading to the greenhouse to find Travis and Tempest heading their way, the former waving a hand in the air.

"Guess she asked Travis to come too," Willow said, offering a curt wave back.

Wallace rolled his eyes watching Travis' cocky strut as he and Tempest walked hand in hand. With his dark hair, sharp green eyes, beauty mark, and model-like features, Wallace pegged Travis to be an expensive-looking version of Neo. Tempest looked less enthused at his side, her eyes focused on the brick under their feet as the pair stopped beside the greenhouse.

"Looks like we both brought a plus one to this emergency meeting," Travis said, grinning as he kissed the back of Tempest's hand and turned his eyes to the charred greenhouse. "Sucks."

"I wonder what the school will do to it," Tempest said, following Travis' gaze. "Remodel it or tear it down and make something new?"

"History shows a remodeling is in the future for the greenhouse!"

The four of them turned to find Serena fast walking down the path to them from the library, an armful of books held against her chest. Though it wasn't hard to forget her, Serena looked drastically different since Wallace had seen her last. Her dark locks were platinum blonde and fell over her chest in straight strands with bangs that stopped just above her blue eyes.

"Glad you could all make it," she said, propping her books against her hip. "This meeting is extremely important for the future of the Roses. Our greenhouse will be getting rebuilt, and the Roses are as well. Tempest, Wallace, nice to see you two."

"Hi, Serena," Tempest said, softly.

Wallace didn't reply, only smiled back when he felt Serena's eyes lingering on him too long for his comfort.

"This work of vandalism against us didn't go unnoticed by the university," Serena said, bobbing her head to the greenhouse. "But as it turns out, we're not exactly liked in the court of public opinion, the university feels we handled knowledge of Arlette's bullying poorly. That if we had spoken to an official, or an adult, something could have been done to save her."

Wallace felt a throb in the side of his head, as if a ghost had kicked him, the realization of what the act of arson meant. An act of rebellion against the Roses for Arlette.

"Well, they're not wrong are they?"

Serena gasped and turned on her heels to find a group of children stomping through the yard adjacent to them, Julian, Reed, and Don leading the pack.

Wallace shifted on his feet and adjusted his shirt. He cast himself a quick glance to the ruined glass of the greenhouse and swiped at his hair before he turned his attention to Don whose eyes focused on the blades of grass under his feet.

"You guys are to blame," Julian said. "If you'd stopped acting like judge, jury, and executioner, you could have saved that girl's life."

Wallace glanced to Tempest who seemed to be detaching herself from the conversation. Her head was down, her hands clasped together at her waist as she wobbled from foot to foot beside Travis. Wallace knew she must harbor her own feelings of guilt regarding Arlette.

"Don't put that on us, that's messed up," Travis said.

Too-good-looking Reed stepped forward and waved his hands through the air. "We didn't come to toss around blame. I wanted to talk to you, Serena."

A shriek from the pack of children startled everyone when Don's little sister broke out from the group and charged forward, head down and arms flying out behind her as she made a beeline for Serena. "Sere!"

Serena crouched and dropped her books into a pile, her arms spreading as she embraced the charging girl in a hug. "Hi Lily!" she said, beaming as she hugged the girl and began playing with the braid in her hair.

"Sere, I've been on campus for two days now and haven't seen you until now!" Lily huffed.

"I'm sorry sweetie, I've been busy," Serena said, kissing the top of Lily's head.

"And Natty isn't in his room at the clinic, where is he?" Lily asked as she attached herself to Serena's side.

"Oh, Nat's – "

"Girls, we don't have time for this," Julian said, shrugging. "Reed just tell them the wonderful news."

"I wouldn't call it wonderful," Reed said, smiling daringly. "But I did come to tell you that the Roses have been officially disband."

"What?" Willow asked under her breath.

Wallace focused in on Serena who had her hands clasped over Lily's shoulder, the girl's face seemed unshaken, though for a second he was sure he saw her mouth twitch.

"You can't do that," Serena said, finally.

"See, it's really hard to register a new club with the student life office," Reed said, brushing back a handful of his lush locks. "Lots of paperwork and approvals to go through, but it's very easy to take leadership of an already existing club. Because the university isn't fond of the Roses at the moment, I saw the opportunity to get my foot in the door and rename the club." Reed spread his arms, smiling as he looked at the group of kids behind him. "You're looking at the newly formed NRR, New Radix Roses."

The young trainers cheered in concert, their small fists pumping the air while Julian clapped.

"The NRR was formed with the goal of unifying the student body through education and prayer with learning focused around the legends and myths of our world," Reed said.

"Reed's a very boring teacher, but he's telling us stories about the Kalos legendary pokémon!" Lily said, squeezing Serena's leg.

Serena rubbed the top of Lily's head as a breathy laugh escaped her lips. "Is this a joke?" she asked. "I'm supposed to believe this motley crew is a serious club? Especially with you involved," she said, nodding to Julian. "Nothing sounds quite as fun as holding séances to talk to the dead."

"Are you making fun of me for wanting to communicate with Arlette?" Julian asked. "That's –"

Serena raised a hand and cut Julian off. "No, I'm making fun of you because you probably hold séances to talk to your dead girlfriend and maybe for the fact that you captured her spirit and keep her in a ball on your waist."

"Shut up!" Julian snapped, ripping a poké ball off his waistline and raising it overhead to throw. "You don't get to talk about her like that!"

Wallace watched Julian's round eyes take on an edge, the skin under his eyes folding and creasing as he screamed at Serena. But before he could throw the ball, a hand gripped his wrist and twisted his arm back.

"It'll be the last thing you ever do with that arm if you decide to release a pokémon here."

Wallace stared, deep in his bewilderment, as a man in a baseball shirt and sweats stood behind Julian. The majority of his head was hidden behind wraps of white bandages and only one eye, his nose, and more than half of his mouth were visible, he looked like a mummy that'd decided to go back to school. The sight was both frightening and captivating for him.

Serena and Lily gasped in unison and ran together toward the bandage man as he released Julian who staggered away, rubbing his shoulder. Serena slipped one of the man's arms over her shoulder while Lily attached herself to one of his legs.

"Natty!" Lily cried. "I missed you, dummy!"

Slight movement in his periphery drew Wallace's attention to Willow, taking a slow and drawn out step backwards from the scene. Even with his sister's assurance, Wallace really couldn't see Nat through all the bandages, anyone could have been under there, but he knew Serena and Lily were right.

"Bella, get your friends and get out of here," Nat said, his arms wrapping around Lily's shoulder and Serena's waist.

Don didn't say anything, he only nodded and tried to usher the kids down the path, but Julian barked out for them not to move.

"No one disrespects me and then gets to tell me what to do," Julian said, spinning his poke ball on his finger. "We'll settle this here," he said, aiming the ball at Serena.

"I promise that you won't battle Serena," Nat said, his voice heavy in bass and slow in delivery, as if each word pained him to utter.

"Let's all just calm down," Reed said. "No one came here today for a battle, just to share the news of the NRR's founding."

"The NRR," Nat said. "Is that that nerdy club Cosmo kept yapping on about?"

"It's not nerdy, it's important and it's going to do some good on campus, unlike the Roses," Julian said. "Soon people will be thanking us for putting them out of commission."

"What?" Nat asked, his head angled toward Serena.

"It's nothing, the Roses are over," Serena said, shaking her head. "It's whatever."

Nat laughed as he rolled his neck back. "God, I wish I could wipe the floor with you punks," he said.

"Anytime, anywhere," Julian said, tossing his ball up and down. "I'll send you back to the clinic where you belong burned boy."

"Let's just go!" Don said, forcefully. "Lily, come on."

"You're not the boss of me," Lily retorted, sticking her tongue out.

Wallace looked behind him to find Travis and Tempest gathered in hush whispers while Willow was still making a slow retreat and heading for the greenhouse door at a shellos' pace.

"You know, if the Roses are disband, then none of our judgments matter anymore," Serena said, rubbing Nat's chest. "That means you're free to battle on campus again."

Nat's visible eye opened wide before he reached up and grabbed a handful of bandages and tore them away, revealing his other eye and some of the tissue on his cheek. Where Wallace expected to find heavily scarred skin, the flesh on Nat's cheek was just slightly glossy and pink, like the soft flesh beneath a scab.

"Oh hell yeah," Nat said, tossing the bandages to the ground. "You ready?" he asked, jutting his finger out at Julian.

"Born ready," Julian said, letting his ball roll off his finger. It hit the ground and exploded, releasing his mightyena on to the yard. "Let's do this thing, Shiba. We've got a lesson to teach here."

"Julian, stop!" Don said. "You don't have to fight Nat."

"I know you're trying to protect your brother, but butt out," Julian said. "He started this. Technically his woman did, but either way, one of them is catching this L. But don't worry, I'll go easy on the burned boy."

"His woman?" Serena snapped, detaching herself from Nat, only to be pulled back in.

"Stop, it's not worth it," Nat said. "The only reason I'm battling you instead of her is because there are kids here and we're in a small field. Serena could freeze us all if she wanted to, but you're in luck, if it's just me your pokémon will only need to be treated for mild wounds."

"Boys are so stupid," Lily said, rolling her eyes. "If you go easy on Natty, your pokémon are gonna die," she said, sticking her tongue out and feigning dead for a second before she started giggling.

Wallace watched as Nat launched his poké ball onto the field, a bisharp taking form in front of mightyena. He remembered meeting the bisharp before, acting as a bodyguard in Nat's clinic room. The match-up didn't look fair, but no one stepped up to say anything until Lily whistled and the two trainers called out their first command.

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Eight

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #36 & #37: **What do you think happened to the two service workers?


	39. Save You From Yourself

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Thirty Nine – Save You From Yourself**

 _If you haven't the strength to impose your terms upon life,  
_ _then you must accept the terms it offers you. - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

With one violent shove and a grating cry, Nat's bisharp threw Julian's mightyena off, the dark-type's teeth scoring faint lines into bisharp's shoulder.

Julian snapped his fingers and aimed a finger gun at Nat as his pokémon came back into place ahead of him. "Nice work, Shiba, I think another fire fang might wrap this match up," he said, lifting his beanie off his mound of dark curls and replacing it. "Is it wrong I'm hoping Shiba's fire fang inflicts a burn? Then both you and your pokémon will be burned. Natty boy, what was all that talk about my pokémon needing treatment if we fought?"

Wallace's worried eyes swept over the field that students going to and from class began avoiding as bisharp and mightyena couldn't contain their fight to a single area.

In his periphery, Wallace could see student's faces pressed to the windows of classroom buildings, all enamored in the outcome of the fight. The NRR, the former members of the Roses, and himself gathered in front of the ruined greenhouse to watch the match, a pathway separating them from the action.

Despite what seemed like an unfair matchup in Nat's favor, Wallace could see Julian toying with Nat with every move he commanded Shiba to make. Knicks and scratches lined bisharp's red shoulders and its thighs. With every impact his right foot made Wallace saw bisharp limp, one of Shiba's earlier fire fang's damaging the metallic appendage.

But as weary as bisharp looked, Nat looked worse. A bib of moisture darkened the neckline of his shirt and beads of sweat dripped from his brow line, making his face shine. The length of the battle seemed to be wearing Nat down as each attack or command he gave bisharp came with a harsh cough followed by shallow breaths.

Wallace turned his eyes from Nat's ragged intakes of air to Serena, clutching Lily to her side like a mother and daughter watching a disaster unfold in front of them.

"Ex...Executioner, charge in and prepare a stone edge," Nat breathed, resting his hands on his knees as he bent over. "Don't let... him touch you."

Bisharp lowered himself into position, a sprinter preparing for takeoff, and as the blades on its forearms ejected he scraped them against each other. "Bi!" Despite his wounded leg, bisharp tore off across the lawn. Bisharp's feet kicked blades of grass into the air as it charged for Shiba who flattened his body to the grass.

"Fire fang," Julian said with ease.

Shiba launched from his crouched position at bisharp, but the dual-type dug its good leg into the ground and pivoted. Leaping to the side to avoid Shiba's gaping jaws, its fangs licked by flames, in the moments of bisharp's evasion, his body began to glow. Hazy white light outlined bisharp's body as he swung his arms out, slicing into the ground and flinging chunks of grass and dirt toward Shiba.

Shiba barked as he lowered himself to the ground again, letting the clumps of debris sail overhead. Wallace watched bisharp land and continue to dig chunks out of the lawn, but as its dirt clod projectiles stopped, large sections of stone began to pierce out of the ground.

"Cheap trick," Julian said, scoffing as he adjusted his hat again. "Shiba, don't get distracted. Take a bite out of that thing the first chance you get."

In an instant, a spire of rock as tall as Wallace launched itself from the lawn. The mightyena lifted its head, his ears twitching at the sight of the rock as he leaped to the side. Shiba yapped as additional rocks, each with pointed edges, flew his way. Without Julian's command, Shiba leaped over the second rock, his paws landing on the next stone for a moment. Using it for momentum, he jumped off and dove to the ground, avoiding another wave of stones that collected in a pile between him and Julian.

"Fire fang," Julian said, running to the side of the lawn to keep the fight in sight. "And don't let go until that bisharp gives up! He doesn't have much left in him."

Bisharp ceased launching stones at Shiba as the last dozen projectiles flew the length of the lawn, Shiba leaping over several and using the largest to launch himself into the air.

Wallace watched the two pokémon take to the sky. Bisharp jumped to match Shiba's height as the dark-type's jaws yawned wide again as embers of fire wrapped its teeth as bisharp came into range. Several of the onlookers to Wallace's side gasped as Shiba managed to secure bisharp's shoulder within its jaws, fire burning away at the pokémon's red flesh.

"Why doesn't Nat do something?" Travis asked, raising his arm and pointing to Nat, standing straight again. "He's just watching, bisharp can't take that." Travis swung his head back and forth, as if in awe of the tide of the battle.

"He's waiting," Lily said, her eyes wide and locked onto the tangled pokémon. "Natty's like a comedian, his timing is what matters."

Wallace's eyes flicked between Nat's blank expression to the fight as the pokémon landed in the center of the field. Bisharp seemed shaky, its good leg wobbling as it supported itself under Shiba's added weight. The skin of Shiba's snout curled, showing the pink of its gums as it sunk another centimeter of its teeth into bisharp's shoulder, a gush of blood spurting free that most of the children from the NRR squealed at.

"Ex, you heard him," Nat said, his voice shallow. "He won't let go until you give up. So while you've got him, go for hone claws."

Despite Shiba's weight on bisharp's weak side, the dual-type jutted both its arms out and clashed its forearm blades. The sound rang across the lawn as if a hundred chefs had begun to sharpen their carving knives, but Shiba seemed unaffected as he began to claw and shake his head, ripping further into bisharp's shoulder.

"Just give it up already!" Julian said, cupping his mouth. "Better quit now before Shiba does serious harm to your bisharp. I know your family is here and you're fighting for your girlfriend, but honestly, this is just embarrassing. I almost feel bad," Julian's lids fluttered closed as he shrugged.

"Serena doesn't need me to fight for her," Nat said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "But this is the first battle on campus I've had in years. If you think I'm gonna lose to you, you're dumber than you look!" With a mighty inhale Nat slammed his fist into his palm. "Ex, brick break."

Julian's eyes snapped open as his head whipped back to the fight, his jaw flying open in the process. "Wait – what? Shiba, detach!"

On command, Shiba's jaws flew open, lines of blood trailing his fangs as he pulled back from bisharp, but as the dark-type moved to run, bisharp's arm swung and caught Shiba's midsection. Squirming, Shiba fought to free himself as bisharp held him close, pinning the dark-type between his arm and the outer edge of its ribcage-like midsection blade.

Considering the angle and perfect vantage point bisharp had, Wallace trembled watching the dual-type pull back his fist and delivered a solid blow to Shiba's chest that resulted in a series of popping, splintering sounds that had the onlookers cringing.

Shiba let out a guttural shriek as the blow forced him from bisharp's arms. Shiba's head smacked the ground, his eyes darting across the faces of the onlookers as he began to whimper and whine, bubbles of crimson blood foaming around the corners of his mouth.

Wallace could see Shiba's eyes surveying them in search of his owner's face and the desperate cries for help pulled at his heartstrings. Elgyem's red lights flashed in the corner of Wallace's eye and he reached up to hold his teammate's hand. "It'll be okay," he said, sure that elgyem could understand Shiba's pain better than he could.

"Shiba!" Julian cried, tripping over a leftover rock from bisharp's stone edge as he tried to run onto the field.

"Executioner, give him a hug," Nat said.

Wallace's eyes grew wide in disbelief as he watched bisharp limp over Shiba's fallen body and scoop the dark-type into his arms. The act did look like bisharp wanted to hug his opponent, but as bisharp slipped Shiba between the blades that encircled its torso and placed its forearms against Shiba's back, Wallace became aware of two things. He knew the reason Nat named his bisharp Executioner and how Lily seemed so sure Julian's pokémon might die.

Julian stumbled as he got back to his feet and darted across the lawn, his hands fumbling at his waistline for a poké ball. "Shiba!"

"He's going to puncture the mightyena's lungs if bisharp ejects its blades that close," Tempest muttered, a hand covering her mouth as if the realization of Nat's intent was a secret. "He wouldn't kill that guy's pokémon would he?"

At a motion in the corner of his vision, Wallace craned his neck around to see Tempest's hand gripping Travis', their faces relaying a different kind of terror in the face of Nat's brutality.

"Nat, stop! You won, let it go!" From the NRR crowd, Don stepped forward, daring a step onto the lawn.

"Shut up, Bella!" Nat snapped back, a crazed looked taking over his features. "I could have had Ex use his guillotine, but this seemed more fun. Ex, hug."

Elgyem pulled his hand free from Wallace and jutted it out toward Shiba, his digit flashing at a faster rate as the psychic-type started a series of urgent and high-frequency beeps.

"Go for it," Wallace said, quickly, once he saw the grave look in his pokémon's eyes.

Wallace focused on Shiba as elgyem's hand lit up. Normally the one being teleported, he'd never paid attention to what the technique looked like when used on another target. As elgyem's lights grew brighter Shiba's fur seemed to ripple like long grass blow by a gale, and for a moment, he looked less real. Shiba's form was there, but he looked more an abstract shape that vanished when Wallace blinked.

A purple shadow remained in place, but quickly faded like the glob of color Wallace would see after staring at the sun. From bisharp's empty arms, Wallace looked to Julian, racing to make it in time as bisharp's body flexed, but rather than a cry of pain, bisharp grunted as he noticed he'd lost his victim.

Wallace watched Julian come to a slow stop on the field, head snapping in each direction until he locked eyes with Wallace and ran straight for him.

"Oh!" Travis gasped, jumping back from Wallace at the sight of Shiba's battered and motionless body at Wallace's feet.

Wallace crouched beside Shiba with elgyem coming to his side and laid a hand on the mightyena's side. Shiba's midsection jerked away from Wallace's touch as the dark-type cried out a series of airy whines, his snout flapping as he struggled to get a solid breath. Julian's shoes slid through the grass and pounded over the walkway as he ran to Wallace and collapsed in front of Shiba.

"Oh, my baby," Julian said, his voice high and wet. He lifted Shiba's head and pulled it into his lap. Julian dared to touch Shiba's side, again, causing the dark-type to cry out.

As Julian uttered words of apology to his pokémon, Wallace watched Serena and Lily rush to Nat who staggered toward his bisharp.

"You should get to the clinic," Tempest said, her hand landing on Julian's shoulder.

Julian nodded and wiped at his eyes as he recalled Shiba and got to his feet. "Reed," he said, his head moving from side to side as he searched for Reed. "Reed!"

Wallace watched Reed stop as he turned the corner, Don at his side, the boy's brows raising at his eyes met Julian's. Around him the children of the NRR were fussing amongst themselves.

"Did you need something from me?" Reed asked.

Julian's shoulders sagged and Wallace watched as his face seemed to fall, a bit of light fading from his eyes at Reed's casual dismissal. After waiting for Julian's reply, Reed turned and kept leading the children and Don toward the Religious Life Center.

Julian didn't stick around following Reed's departure. He locked eyes with Nat and Serena for a breath, then left, running past the library and taking a shortcut between two buildings as the others gravitated toward Nat.

"How do you feel?"

Wallace heard Serena fussing over Nat as he joined them on the lawn, trailing behind Travis and Tempest.

"Better than ever," Nat said, though his panting and sweat dripping face disagreed.

"Big brother, you were awesome!" Lily said, throwing her arms in the air.

"Thanks, kiddo," Nat said, placing a hand on Lily's head that seemed to placate the girl. "Wallace, I saw you with a girl over there, who was she?"

"Who?" Wallace asked as he cocked a brow and glanced to Tempest, who looked confused equally confused.

"This is Tempest, my girlfriend," Travis announced, kissing the back of her hand, his eyes on Wallace.

Wallace grimaced and shook his head at Travis, not seeing the point of their PDA, especially in front of him.

"Oh, was it Willow?" Serena said as she attached herself to Nat, though it seemed like a necessity rather than an act of affection as Nat looked ready to collapse. "Where'd she go?"

Wallace turned to find the face of the greenhouse vacant. "She must have left during the battle," he said. "I'm not sure where she went."

"That girl that was trying to copy me?" Lily asked, running a hand through her white-blonde hair. "I saw her sneaking into that burned building. Does she live there or something? I'd probably stay inside if I were her too, knowing someone as cute as me was running around." Lily covered her mouth as she said the last bit, her narrowed eyes focused on the greenhouse.

"There's nothing inside anymore," Serena said, her forehead creasing. "What's she doing in there?"

"I'll get her," Travis volunteered as he jogged away from the group and swung the door to the greenhouse open, yelling inside for Willow.

The group waited for a breath until Travis dove inside. Through the gaps in the greenhouse's structure, Wallace could see Travis' legs walking inside or his back as he turned a corner.

When Travis didn't return right away Serena rubbed Nat's chest and nodded toward the dorms. "C'mon, you need to get to bed," she said. "This was too much for you at once."

Nat snickered as Serena struggled to support his weight and also turn him toward the dorms. "My nurses would kill you if they knew you let me battle," he said, grinning from ear to ear.

"It's not the nurses that scare me, it's your mother," Serena said, pinching Nat's side as he fought against leaving. "Let's go."

The sound of glass smacking brick caused the group to turn to the greenhouse as Travis stumbled outside, a struggling and yelling Willow in hand. Willow pulled back against Travis, fighting hard to stay inside, but Travis held on and managed to pull her from the building and onto the lawn.

"Travis! Stop!" Willow yelled through gritted teeth as she tried to pry Travis' hand off her wrist.

"Come on, you watched the battle, come congratulate the winner!" Travis said, cheery, as he pulled Willow back into the group.

Willow looked ready to flee for her life as she met the eyes of the others in the yard. Something clicked in the back of Wallace's mind, but it wasn't until he turned to Nat that Willow's reluctance made any sense.

Nat's lips parted as his eyes narrowed on Willow and Wallace could practically see the gears behind his eyes clicking into place. Unfortunately for him, his own gears clicked into place a second too late or else he would have had elgyem teleport Willow someplace safe, like Kanto.

"It's you," Nat said, stumbling forward. "I remember you. You came to visit me when I was in the clinic. You unplugged all my machines, you put a pillow over my face so I couldn't call for help! You threw me on the floor!"

Wallace, Tempest, and Travis backed away as Nat made slow work moving forward with Serena trying to keep him supported. Willow took slow steps back, her fists balled at her sides.

"Wha – What?" Serena gasped, trying to watch Nat's steps, but also keep her eyes on Willow. "What's happening? I'm – I don't get it."

"She attacked me," Nat said, his eyes falling onto Wallace. "She's one of them! Why were you here with her?"

Wallace stayed facing Travis and Tempest, though his eyes darted in their sockets from Nat's angered face to Willow, who looked full of fear like a cornered prey.

"Willow, what is he talking about?" Serena asked. "Will somebody explain what's happening?"

"She's one of them, she's friends with the people the police have been looking for," Nat said. "The Orphans, she pushed me out of my clinic bed and told me she was sending a message from the Orphans after I got attacked."

Wallace breathed a sigh of relief as everyone seemed to shift their attention from him to Willow. He watched the wave of understanding wash over Tempest and Travis who instinctively took several steps away from the white-haired girl. Serena leaned into Nat, her mouth hanging open as she digested what he'd said.

"Willow?" Serena said. "Is that true. Did you – did you attack Nat? I cried to you about that, about how it wasn't fair that I couldn't help him. Did you pretend to be my friend, knowing you were the reason behind it all?"

Willow shook her head, her hands coming up in front of her as a sign of surrender. "I never pretended," she said, the only thing she managed to say in her defense with a shaky voice.

A sharp exhale drew Wallace's attention to Nat's side where Lily was stomping her feet, a poké ball clutched in her small hand. "Did you hurt my Natty?" she snapped, her fingers dancing over the locking button. "I won't hesitate!"

"Wallace, did you know this?" Serena asked.

Just like that the scrutiny of eyes on him had returned and set his head on fire. Wallace scratched at his neck as it felt like flames were eating away at the flesh of his scalp. He looked to elgyem who only stared back with his saucer eyes, offering no form of support.

"You had to," Nat said. "You know more about the Orphans than anyone, you knew she was one of them didn't you?"

"You never said anything? Travis asked. "Not cool."

"Wallace, tell me you aren't friends with her," Serena said.

Wallace's eye twitched at Travis' input and earned a reactionary eye-roll from him. But before he could make an attempt at defending himself Willow spoke up.

"We're not friends," she said, waving off Wallace. The white-haired girl cut him a look as she took a step back on the lawn, distancing herself from the group. "I don't have any friends here, I'm just – sorry, Nat, I'm really sorry. I'll go."

Wallace saw the others tense up as Willow backed up on the lawn, Serena squeezed Nat's arm tighter and Tempest and Travis began to whisper amongst themselves. Without thinking, Wallace rushed and grabbed Willow's hand.

Willow jolted back, her hazel eyes flicking between Wallace's face and their joined hands. "What are you doing?" she asked, fighting against his grip.

"She's my friend," Wallace said, holding firm onto Willow while trying to coax her to come to his side, not wanting to force her after Travis dragged her from the greenhouse. His words earned the reactions he expected from the others, gasps and a look of disgust and anger from Serena and Nat.

"I can't be here anymore," Serena said, her eyes darting over the grass as she turned away from the pair and tried to pull Nat with her. "This is too much, Lily come with me, honey."

Travis and Tempest moved to follow her, casting Wallace and Willow a look over their shoulders as they came to Serena's side.

"Wallace." Nat backed away with them but held his gaze on Wallace longer than the others. "I told you that stuff because I thought you could help because I wanted you to keep my family safe."

"Aren't they?" Wallace fired back. "Aren't they safe? When I left campus did the Orphans have anything to do with them?"

Nat's mouth twitched as he pursed his lips, looking as if he was struggling to digest what Wallace had presented to him. "Stay away from my family," he said. "That includes Don and Serena. If I see either of you," he said, his pointer finger shaking between Wallace and Willow. "Nothing's going to stop Ex from cutting your teams in half."

Wallace kept his hold on Willow, for his own sake, until he watched the others disappear between his dorm building and the Religious Center. As soon as he let his clammy hand slip off Willow's wrist, her hand came winding up and slapped the back of his head.

"Ow!" Wallace hissed, ducking and cupping the back of his head. The blow and shock sent elgyem tumbling through the air and looking dumbfounded as he looked at Willow and the cowering Wallace. "What was that for?"

"For being the stupidest person I know," Willow said, clenching her fist. "You didn't need to do that, you didn't have to save me from them."

Wallace hissed and rubbed the back of his head, stinging from Willow's slap. "I didn't do it to rescue you from them. I did to save you from yourself," he said. "You're hiding in burned down greenhouses avoiding your roommate and next you'd be running from Nat and Serena. You're isolating yourself, who do you have to go to for help?"

"I have my sister," Willow said, folding her arms.

Wallace shook his head and sighed. "Doesn't count because she doesn't know you're an Orphan. You've got no one."

"So what, now you're my knight in shining armor?" Willow said, letting her eyes roll to the back of her head. "This is so stupid."

"I don't see anyone else coming to keep your head afloat," Wallace said as he held his arm out and let elgyem reclaim his spot.

"Well, since you seem to want to fix all my problems," Willow said, turning away from Wallace and staring at the sky. "I can't go back to Simone, so I need a new roommate. Can you wave your magic wand and make that happen? Can you use your money to get a single?"

"I can't get you a single." Wallace swallowed an air bubble and bobbed his head. "I can get you a new room though, so long as you don't mind rooming with two boys."

Willow's eye popped open and her jaw fell. "Are you kidding me? You're one thing, but how is your roommate going to feel about sharing his space with a girl?"

"I think my roommate might actually love it," Wallace said.

* * *

After returning to the dorms with Willow and dropping off his bath kit, he left her to the task of collecting her things from her room. With the goal in mind to make progress in the case of disappearing servicemen, Wallace and elgyem ventured off toward the west side of campus to an unmarked building attached to the back of the Linden Gymnasium.

Inside the first set of doors, a paper sign taped to the door stated he'd found the Office for Facilities and Maintenance, assuring him he'd found the right place.

Past another door, Wallace found a small office space filled with cubicles and an even smaller waiting room with two chairs and a coffee table. Beyond a false wall to give the impression of a lobby, the building expanded into a warehouse of sorts. Humans and pokémon moved throughout sectioned off areas collecting things from shelves and racks as they went.

To his right, Wallace saw a group of machamp standing on ladders and hauling large pieces of equipment and tools from the higher racks and handing them down the line to a waiting machoke who then handed the smallest of tools to machop waiting on the ground.

A group of men in dirt-covered overalls crouched alongside a team of drilbur and quagsire, placing cross body sacks over them.

"Excuse us," a woman to Wallace's left said.

He shuffled to the side as three women and five men moved past and out the doors he'd entered, a horde of minccino on their heels.

"Can I help you?"

After watching the last minccino almost get its tail stuck in the door, Wallace turned to a small desk across the lobby from him as a man with olive skin and foreign features rounded the corner behind the desk.

"Hi, yes, uh, I was wondering about the people that work on things like blackouts?" Wallace said as he focused his eyes on an oval name badge that read Ozzy.

"Yeah?" Ozzy said, his head tilting to the side. "We handle that kind of stuff here. What would you like to know?"

"Is there some kind of list or registry of who works here?" Wallace asked, his eyes darting from Ozzy to the department areas behind him. Part of him hoped he'd see the men who were in his building that morning walking around, but try as he might, he couldn't conjure even the faintest image of what they looked like.

Ozzy bit the corner of his lip as he tipped his head to the other side. "The campus website has a list of our adult workers and what they do for the school, but as far as work records, I can't exactly hand that over to you."

"Of course," Wallace said with a sigh as he watched a woman strap a series of brushes and cleaning wands to a harness attached to the back of a fearow and wondered how the flying-type was going to make it outside.

"Is there a reason you're asking?" Ozzy asked, lacing his fingers on the desk in front of him.

"I think some of your workers were in my building this morning, we had a blackout," Wallace said, forcing himself to focus his eyes on Ozzy. "I didn't get their names, just wanted to tell them thanks. They were gone before I got the chance."

"Oh, is that all?" Ozzy stopped tipping his head like his neck was broken and smiled and opened a book on the desk, his finger running down a column of words. "Well, our employees know their work is valued and appreciated. It kind of makes me happy that you'd want to thank them personally, but it's not necessary, besides I don't even have a record of us responding to a blackout this morning. Are you sure it was us?"

A familiar aching throb in his forehead had Wallace pressing his knuckle into his temple. "I'm pretty sure. They were dressed in overalls like the people here, they said they were there to fix the blackout," he said, glancing to elgyem who looked about as confused as Ozzy.

Ozzy's mouth curled down as he shook his head at the book. "I've got nothing here, unless they failed to log it, but that never happens, I'm sorry. Maybe it was a different department. Is there something else I can help you with?"

Wallace swallowed down whatever argument he had left and backed out of the lobby, bumping into several returning workers in the process. He scanned their faces, but everyone looked like a stranger, none of them triggering anything in his memory.

Exiting through a small alley, his eyes continuously darted back to the facilities office in hopes the doors might open and someone who'd overheard his conversation might rush out and claim to recall the blackout, validating all his claims. But by the time he'd reached the main path through campus he hadn't seen anyone else in overalls and from his position the facilities office wasn't even in sight. He clenched his fists and sprinted back down the alley, skidding to a stop as the office came back into sight.

"Gy?" Elgyem hummed, pointing to the building and shrugging his shoulders.

"Just wanted to make sure..." Wallace made slow work walking back out of the alley and toward the fountains. "I wish you'd been there this morning," he said. "It was like those men, the blood, everything just vanished."

Backing out of the alley, Wallace felt his shoe land on an uneven surface that seemed softer than the stone he'd been expecting, followed by a sharp intake of air. A pair of hands gently shoved his shoulders, though it did nothing as his foot remained pressed down as he turned to find Persia's pained face behind him.

"Oh!" Wallace jerked his foot back like his toes had landed in a fire. "Persia, I'm sorry, I didn't see you there."

"Kind of hard to see me when you're walking in reverse!" Persia wailed, hopping in place as she rubbed the top of her sneaker.

Wallace felt his face burning as the girl, at least half a foot shorter than him, started to hiss and sigh as she shook her foot out. The girl he'd caught dancing in the middle of a tournament a year ago hadn't changed much. Aside from losing the colored strips in her hair, Persia's warm brown skin shone under the summer daylight, the sun highlighting a mess of freckles on her cheeks and reflecting light off a dozen small crystal beads woven into her hair.

Her outfit choice reminded him of something Nicki would find wearable, pants that exposed much of her legs and covered her navel with a tattered shirt that stopped a good five inches above the top of her pants. Nothing of importance showed, but the amount of skin his roommate and Persia seemed comfortable exposing caused Wallace to laugh nervously.

"Aside from assault on my tootsies, what's up?" Persia asked, flipping the lid on a purple travel mug and taking a large swig while her oceanic eyes focused in on him.

Wallace shook his head and let his eyes trail off toward his dorm hall, figuring he should check in on Willow in the process of moving into his room. "Nothing, just heading home, going to – " Before Wallace could finish his sentence Persia had her arm linked with his.

"Perfect, so you're not doing anything important," she said, grinning, as she stepped forward and despite her small stature managed to pull Wallace along.

The duo passed the Origin Center and the beach and wooden boardwalk were in sight when Wallace started to pull back from Persia. "What are we doing anyway?"

"You're keeping me company," Persia said as they crossed from a stone path to wood as they arrived on one of the school's docks.

"Uh, company?" he asked, struggling to time his footfalls with Persia and her smaller legs as the sign of motor boats and water-types waiting by the docks triggered an almost automatic response in him to stop walking, turn and run for the hills.

"The freshmen are loading into their boats," Persia said, followed by another swig from her mug. "We can probably squeeze in with them."

"I'm not going to the safari!" Wallace ripped his arm free from Persia's hold, startling the smaller girl who nearly dropped her mug in the process. Wallace backed away, aware of the eyes of chaperones and students on him.

Persia let her arms flop down at her sides while her shoulders dropped. "What's the problem? That thing was a year ago, relax."

Wallace felt the muscles in his shoulders tense at Persia's referral of Chara's attack as a _thing_ , but a head of dark hair bouncing toward the boats drew his attention away from her. Moving under one of the boathouses was Don followed by Reed and several of the kids they'd been escorting around all day.

"I guess I can go by myself, but Calvin already ditched me and everyone else I asked flaked out," Persia said, shrugging as she stared at the bay water. "Apparently going to the safari past your freshman year is deemed uncool, but whatever."

The idea of returning to the islands, knowing the Orphans could be on any one of them using the ancient series of tunnels, left Wallace feeling weightless, but the thought of facing Don seemed to ground him. "I'll go," he said quickly, his eyes shooting back to Persia the moment Don was out of sight. "But can you promise me something, you won't leave my side. No matter what?"

"Sure?" Persia said as she grabbed his arm and tugged him toward the boats. "We'll use the buddy system!"

* * *

To Wallace's delight, the ride to the safari islands was quick and painless as he and Persia shared a boat with a few first years who kept to themselves the ride over. But as Persia pointed out they were veering away from the main island, Wallace saw Don and Reed heading straight for it, the island housing the Haven. Against his better judgment, Wallace scooted to the back of the boat and urged the boat's operator to follow them.

The operator didn't reply, only turned the boat to the east and headed straight for the island. Wallace sighed as he eased back into his seat, catching Persia's eyes on him, though she remained silent as they reached the island.

The operator leaped from the boat first as the metallic hull scraped wet sand and tugged them onto shore, tying the towrope to a peg in the sand.

As Wallace helped Persia out of the boat, elgyem floated away and drifted along the beach, gathering with his psychic abilities and showering himself in the grains. "Gy!" he cried out, pelting Wallace and Persia with a rush of sand.

"Hey!" Persia scoffed, spitting out a few specks of sand. "What was that for?"

Tossing elgyem a look over his shoulder, Wallace saw the psychic-type flashing his red digits back at him, his arms crossed over his chest. "I don't think he's happy about being here." From the beach, Wallace's eyes tracked up the sand to the line of trees ahead of them that concealed the island's only attraction, the abandoned Haven mansion he felt both repulsed and attracted to.

As the first years sprinted up the beach, their footfalls kicking up sand behind them, Wallace recalled himself running down the beach. Frenzied and desperate, his feet barely had time to sink into the beach as they carried them from the jungle to the water where he started his frantic swim back to campus, away from the dangers of the island.

"Well, it did seem like you were a little eager to come to this island in particular," Persia said as she looked over a poké ball in her hand.

Wallace watched an unmoving elgyem, arms still crossed in front of him and noticed a groove in the sand behind him. Elgyem's glide across the beach hadn't been done out of fun, he'd drawn a line in the sand and was daring Wallace to cross it. "Elgy, do you trust me?" he asked, crouching in front of his teammate. "I know what's here, and I know it's dangerous, but..." Wallace trailed off, thought that Persia might be listening and taking note of everything he said. "We need to be here right now."

Elgyem tilted his ovoid head to the side as the red lights on his hands faded and light returned to the yellow spots instead. "El?"

"We have to find Don and you'll understand," Wallace said, wrapping an arm around elgyem's waist and pulling him to his chest.

"Let's go!" Persia called, her voice distant.

Expecting the girl to be at his side, Wallace searched the beach to find her standing just outside the tree line, her arms cradling a purple blob.

"What is that?" Wallace asked as he jogged up the beach and ducked under a long branch Persia held aside for him.

"It's a Bubbles," Persia chirped, holding the blob close and kissing the air over it.

It looked like an orb of ombre gelatin, its upper half consisting of constantly wriggling lavender goo while the lower half, separated by a jagged line, was made of a darker purple. The longer Wallace stared, counting egg-sized green ovals on its body, a pair beady black eyes appeared on its body as it turned in Persia's arm and regarded Wallace.

"Hi?" Wallace said, offering a small wave.

The blob shrieked and pivoted, swirling around in Persia's arms until its face, Wallace had to guess what side was its face, was buried in Persia's arms. "Gooo..."

Persia gasped and cradled the pokémon closer to her face, cooing to it and whispering in comforting tones. "You scared her," she said, her eyes cutting a glare at Wallace. "Bubbles is special and soft, you can't startle her."

"All I said was hi," Wallace said, averting his eyes from the sensitive blob to the passing trees as they followed a beaten path.

Taking up Wallace's lack of interest, elgyem squeezed out of his trainer's grasp and floated alongside Persia, prodding the pokémon. Each time elgyem's hand touched Bubbles it seemed to slip off, causing Bubbles to quiver and jiggle.

"Be nice," Persia said. "Bubbles is just a baby. I hatched her over summer break. She was a gift actually, from Arlette."

Wallace snapped his neck back in Persia's direction just as elgyem flashed him with a green light. The psychic-type began pointing to himself, taking turns flashing Persia and Wallace. "Gy, gy! Elgy!" Giving touching Bubbles another try, elgyem spread his arms and tried his best to hug it, but ended up sliding off.

Wallace withheld a laugh as elgyem faltered in the air, a collection of slime falling off his face as he recovered from his failed hug. "Elgyem was bred by Arlette too," he said.

"We became friends and she had so many pokémon in storage," Persia said, her eyes rolling back. "She let me look through one day and I saw a goomy and knew I wanted it. I thought she would say no, but she offered to breed me my own." Persia smooched the air over her goomy again and sighed. "I miss her, you know? She was awesome, I don't care about the rumors. Though I was a little jealous she knew Andrew Gates." Persia eyes stopped roving in their sockets as they focused on Wallace again.

Wallace let his own eyes settle back onto the path ahead of them as a familiar feeling settled over him, the moment when he stopped just Wallace and became Wallace Pearce. The moment his action and lies from the past year resurfaced and judgement ensued.

The longer he went without replying the harder he could feel Persia's eyes boring into him as they headed into a thicker part of the jungle.

"I'm not judging you, if that's what you're thinking," Persia said, finally. "I'm sure you've gotten enough of that."

Wallace sunk a fang into his lower lip to quell the need to reply and instead focused on a gathering of ledyba floating overhead.

"I'm actually a big fan of Andrew," Persia said. "Obsessed actually, and when I thought he was dead it kind of ruined me. I was so excited at the idea of being his classmate, if my parents hadn't already paid for my first year I wouldn't have come. But then everything started happening and when I heard he was alive, it kind of motivated me to do better and be better. I didn't quite reach the top of the class, but I'm up there!"

The longer they walked the more Persia gushed over Andrew and all the PokéView streams she'd watched and saved until her family computer ran out of space. While detailing the posters of Andrew and elite trainers she'd collected, Wallace could feel the vocal lock he'd placed on himself loosening as Persia's recollection of the past year had nothing to do with him at all.

"Would you like to meet him sometime?" he asked as he pressed on ahead of Persia to hold aside a tangle of vines in their way.

Persia stopped in her tracks, her arms falling and letting her goomy hang at her waist. "Are you serious? Like absol-utely serious?" Persia shrieked and darted through the vine canopy. "I would love to! I have so many questions and things I need him to sign. I might actually die in his presence, is he as cool as I imagine him to be?"

"Well, we're childhood friends, so I've seen him being spanked and disciplined by his mom, so I think my vision of him is a little less grand than yours." Wallace felt an honest laugh brewing in his chest at Persia's excitement, but every bit of joy died and crumbled within him as he moved under the canopy and entered a circular clearing. Untamed grass surrounded them and in the center of the field stood the manor of all his nightmares.

As Wallace let the vines fall behind him a sickly feeling washed over him. The weather during his first encounter with the Haven reflected the series of events that had yet to come. A brewing storm had led Chara into trapping his victims inside and even had Wallace stuck in the mansion, but with Persia at his side, the weather contradicted the storm Wallace felt inside.

It was sunny, too warm, and the sky was a brilliant blue above the mansion. As the clouds broke and shifted, beams of sunlight reflected off the mansion's roof and siding and illuminated patches of grass, he could even see wild pokémon frolicking in the shadow of the mansion.

"Hey, let's go the other way," Persia offered, her hand gently pulling on Wallace's elbow.

Wallace remained unmoved, his eyes darting from the windows of the mansion to the door and more importantly the building itself. No police tape, no signs advising students to keep out, nothing that showed anything of significance had ever happened inside.

A breeze pushed through the clearing, swaying the grass and in the whoosh of the grass blades shifting in the wind Wallace heard his own legs cutting through the grass as he fled.

"Wallace?" Persia asked, pulling hard, but her hand clamped onto his elbow as a scream seemed to come from every direction at once.

The sound, undeniably human, but grating and mechanical at the same time filled Wallace with a profound sense of fear.

Overwhelmed by his confusion and dread, Wallace took off. He heard Persia calling for him as he sprinted across the field, but didn't bother stopping. A glint of purple light shattered the air beside as elgyem appeared in his periphery, flying by his side as they reached the mansion.

The doors weren't locked or secured by chains and Wallace threw them open with ease. A wave of stale air and a pungent decaying odor greeted him as his eyes fell onto the main staircase. Several steps up Wallace outlined the gap in the stairs with his eyes, the same gap of missing steps that crushed James was there where it had been nearly a year ago.

"HELP!"

The scream echoed through the mansion again, though now that he was closer, Wallace could clearly hear its distortion. Inching across the entry floor, Wallace knew for sure it belonged to a human, but it sounded like a recording of a man's scream played through busted speakers.

"Where is that coming from?" Persia asked, her shoes slapping the tiled entry floor. "It sounds awful!"

"HELP!"

In the moments between screams, with only Wallace's own desperate breaths filling the air, he and Persia wandered the hallow and tainted halls of the once famous Haven. Though Wallace knew no one technically lived there, the amount of grime and deterioration the mansion had suffered since his last visit was beyond his comprehension.

In the right hallway, Wallace stretched his arm out and let his fingers brush the peeling wallpaper, the material flaking and crumbling under his fingers. The thought of Katherine popped into his mind. The blizzard attack she used had likely frozen the mansion that eventually thawed out.

"Wallace!" Persia hissed.

Turning, Wallace saw her pressed to the wall, her eyes darting to a door beside her. Elgyem pushed off from Wallace's shoulder and flew to Persia's side, pressing his face to an opening in the doorway before he flashed his red digits up, illuminating the hall in a crimson flash.

Although he'd crept down the hall without a care of making noise, as he backtracked to the door, Wallace kept glancing to the ground, wary of any creaky floorboards until the gap in the doorway was in sight.

The interior was a sort of parlor room, long ancient looking couches were set across from each other around an oval table. Between the couches, propped against the table was a girl, her young face twisted into a look of fear as her wide eyes darted between two boys standing in the room with her.

"HELP!"

The suddenness of the scream startled Wallace and he instinctively gripped Persia's arm for support to keep from collapsing into the door. One of the boys in the room with the girl raised his arm, brandishing a rectangular device with a glowing screen before he brought it down and whacked it against his knee.

Wallace watched the boy continue to smack the device on his knee until he heard the harsh crack of plastic. Seemingly pleased, the boy started to chuckle and pry apart the device until the back tore off.

"Enough of that," he said, shaking the device until a small square battery popped out and he dropped the device to the floor.

"If you want your pokémon back just ask for them," the other boy said, juggling five poké balls high in the air.

Wallace's eyes darted to the girl as she slid onto the floor and brought her hands in front of her chest. In seamless movements she started to move and making shapes and motions with her hands, her lips twitching every few seconds, her girlish face creasing and frowning as she communicated with her hands.

"What?" the juggler asked, looking to his partner in crime. "I didn't catch that, do you speak that language?"

"Nope!" the first boy said. "Toss me one of them."

The boys started laughing together as the juggler sent one of the poké balls flying at his partner. The ball smacked the boy in his chest and then dropped, but before it hit the floor the boy kicked it up with the side of his foot and began kicking the ball between his feet.

The girl was still talking with her hands, her fingers and wrists working in overtime, her face conveying the urgency as the boys played games in front of her. Wallace watched her hands sag before she lowered her head and started to wipe her eyes.

"I don't think she wants them back, she isn't saying anything," the juggler said. "Maybe we should toss these into the ocean."

"Sounds good to me!" the other boy said as the ball was coming back down. Rather than bounce it back up, he pulled his leg back and kicked the poké ball.

Wallace couldn't catch the blur of red and white as it shot across the room, but he heard the window shatter as a result.

The girl covered her head, trembling as she looked to the busted window, tears dribbling from her cheeks. She balled her fists and struck the ground before she started to sign again, grunting and huffing with each motion her hands went through.

"No one knows sign language you freak, why don't you talk?" The boy who kicked the ball stomped across the room and grabbed the girl's hands.

The girl's mouth yawned open as the boy twisted her hands under and yelled. What came from her mouth was a harsh, scraping syllable, hardly a word at all, but the emotion was there and it burned Wallace's eyes.

As his hand landed on the door, preparing to shove it open, the wood vanished under his palm as the door seemed to fly open on its own. Stunned as the door smacked the wall and his hiding place was exposed, Wallace gaped as the boys turned their attention to him. Before Wallace could think of anything to say, elgyem flew into the room, the lights on his hands flashing altogether.

"Who the hell are you?" the juggler asked, catching the poké balls as they fell into his arms.

"Gy!" Elgyem waved his arms around the room, a burst of psychic energy knocking the juggler off his feet and sending the poké balls rolling across the room. The other boy released the girl and reached to his waistline and flipped a ball off a hook.

A bluish-black pokémon emerged from the ball, several tattered-looking pink feathers sticking out from its body with two sharp claws ejecting from its paws. "Snea!"

"Sneasel, mess this fool up! Quick attack!"

Persia slid into the doorway and threw her goomy into the room. "Bubbles, use protect!"

Wallace watched the goomy land with a splat beside elgyem, its body quivering as plates of light shimmered before the two of them. The boy's sneasel shot forward and smacked the dome of lights and bounced back, flipping head over heels as it slid back to its trainer.

The boy growled and shook his fist in the air. "Two on one? Not fair!"

As Wallace had a chance to see the boy from the front he noticed he was considerably younger than himself, even missing one of his front teeth.

"Yeah, the two of you picking on her wasn't fair either!" Persia said, folding her arms over her chest. "You and I can fight if you want, but just know I've got a team that can take on any elite four!"

"Let's just go!" the juggler said, getting to his feet.

The other boy spat on the floor as he scooped up his sneasel and joined his friend as they ran for it. Wallace and Persia moved to the side, giving them an escape route, but the moment the boys cleared the room they collided with someone passing in the hall.

"I wondered where you two ran off to," Reed said, standing over the fallen boys. "Causing trouble no doubt."

"R-Reed!" the juggler said. "We weren't doing anything."

"We were just exploring!" the other boy yelped.

Watching Reed visually scold the boys, Wallace saw Don moving into sight in the hall, inspecting the scene. The moment Don's eyes left the hall, surveyed the room, and fell on Wallace he looked eager to leave.

"These degenerates are with you?" Persia asked. "They're too young to be freshmen, what's going on here?"

"These are some of our older NRR members," Reed said. "I cleared it with the University to bring them with us to the safari. I thought the history lesson of the islands and the chance at catching new pokémon would be a fun field trip, but apparently, not all of my kids can handle it."

"We're s-sorry," the juggler said.

"Let's just go, we can deal with this somewhere else," Don said, slipping behind Reed and out of sight.

"Go," Reed said, stepping aside and gesturing down the hall.

The boys quickly got to their feet and ran out of sight while keeping Reed in sight like children running from a spanking. Reed nodded to Persia and Wallace as he followed the boys.

Elgyem's weight fell onto Wallace's shoulder, his arm extended and flashing at the hall. "Em?"

"I know," Wallace said. "But I don't want to talk to Don with anyone else around."

"Thank you!" A deep man's voice said from the room behind Wallace.

He turned, eyebrows cocked, surprised at the bass in the voice when only two girls remained in the room. He watched Persia, moving around the room to gather the fallen poké balls, and then looked to the girl on the floor, sitting with the black device in her lap the first boy had torn apart.

Wallace made a confused noise in his throat as he watched the girl look to the device and start typing on the screen. With a solid press on the screen the man's voice came out again.

"Yes, that was me," the disembodied voice said. "I use my tablet to talk, I have a great text-to-speech app."

"That was sign language you were using, right?" Persia asked as she came to the girl's side and held the balls out. "I'll go fetch the one that idiot kicked outside."

Wallace watched the girl type in her response before she collected her pokémon from Persia. "Yes, sometimes that works, but not many people on campus understand sign language, so this works better," the voice said. "My name is Astrid Starfate, nice to meet you, thanks again for your help."

Persia grinned and folded her arms behind her back. "I'm Persia Swift, but you can call me Percy if you like! Be right back!"

Wallace stepped aside as Persia ran from the room to retrieve the lost ball. Left alone with the mute girl and her talking tablet, Wallace focused on elgyem until the girl spoke to him.

"Who are you?" Astrid asked through the tablet. "Your elgyem came in at just the right time."

"Wallace Pearce," he said, rubbing elgyem's head. "Good job jumping in to protect her, you were faster than me." Instead of an instant reply, Wallace found the girl frantically typing on her tablet, her features widening as she held the tablet up. On the screen were search results of his name showing several pictures of him and a small biography the search results had created. "Yeah, that's me."

Persia popped up outside the broken window, waving the missing poké ball in the air. "Got it!"

* * *

End of Chapter Thirty Nine

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #38:** Do you think Wallace will be able to help Willow?


	40. Like Father, Like Son

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Forty – Like Father, Like Son**

 _Be prepared for the coming of the Stranger._ _-_ _T.S. Eliot_

* * *

Wallace awoke to the plastic flaps of his window blinds shooting to the ceiling and slapping the roll. His mundane adventure through the safari mansion the day before permeated his dreams, leaving him anxious and restless, and the sight of sunlight on his first day of school made him want to bury himself back into his covers.

"Good morning to nobody in this room except my newest roommate, Willow," Nicki announced.

Wallace's eyes cracked open again and caught a glimpse of Nicki standing at the foot of his bed, grinning. On the floor between them Willow lay curled on a blow-up mattress Wallace bought from the bookstore last minute. Nicki's rude awakening seemed to affect her similarly as she pulled her stray limbs back into her blankets and tightened the ball she'd slept in.

Elgyem crawled out from Wallace's sheet and waved his arm at the window. Glints of purple light and sparkles sizzled in the air as the blinds rolled back down and blocked the sun again. "Gy..." he groaned as he rubbed his eyes and collapsed onto the pillow beside Wallace.

"Up and at 'em boy and girl," Nicki said, snapping.

"Do you have to be as loud as your clothes?" Willow asked, her words slurring through her sleep as she rolled away from the windows.

Clearing discharge from his eyes, Wallace noticed Nicki wasn't clad in their signature nightgown. They were dressed in a pair of highlighter orange shorts, a white button-up shirt with a matching orange bowtie and hot pink suspenders they were snapping against their chest.

"I wonder if we'll have any classes together," Nicki said, bouncing across the room toward Wallace's desk that he'd agreed to share with Willow as every inch of Nicki's flat surface was covered in makeup and accessories. "Now, where are those schedules?"

Wallace pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes as he listened to Nicki rummage through papers on his desk. "G'morning," he said, softly, as he pulled his sheets off, revealing his litleo curled up between his legs with spinarak nestled into her fur. Wallace laid back down, mindful not to disturb Mila's resting place as he laid his head down beside elgyem and rubbed the psychic's head. "Big day ahead of us," he said.

"Lame."

Wallace tossed a look in Nicki's direction as they let his and Willow's schedules fall to the desk as they walked along their bed and stepped into a pair of pink heels. "What?" he asked.

Nicki shook their head and scoffed. "I'll forgive Willow, she's got Advanced Coordination first thing, but why do you have Theory and Ethics?" they asked, catching Wallace's eyes in the mirror as they adjusted their bowtie. "That's such a first-year class."

"Mind your business." Despite being off campus for the second half of his freshman year, Wallace kept in touch with his professors through email. Each of them was okay with him finishing their coursework online, though some classes like his training lab were impossible to finish from home. Also, Professor Sutcliffe refused to budge on passing him due to his excessive tardies and absences prior to leaving the university which meant retaking his ethics class.

"You know what I was thinking?" Nicki snapped their suspenders again and turned from the mirror, dropping their hands on their hips as they tapped their foot on the floor. "This room is small for everything we've got going on."

Peering through his lashes at the current state of their room, Wallace knew Nicki was absolutely right. The addition of Williow's luggage had taken up every bit of extra space they had in their closets and drawers and adding a bed into the middle of the floor left very little walking room and the cheri berry on top was adding Wink's plastic pool back into the room. Essentially the only clear path started in front of the door, went around Nicki's bed, past their desks, down the side of Wallace's bed, and to the windows.

"Think we can upgrade to a quad?" Nicki asked, scrunching their face up as they made pinching motions with their index fingers. "Or is that asking for too much?"

Willow groaned and shot up in bed, her white-blonde hair unkempt and sticking up at odd angles. "Clearly you two are going to keep talking. Look, I'm not supposed to be in here, there's no way they're going to let you move into a quad because the girl that's living in your room against campus rules makes the room too cramped." Willow hung head for a breath as she rubbed her eyes and smoothed back some of her hair strands. "Wallace, just – "

"You're not going back to Simone's room," he said, not giving Willow a chance to throw out the argument she'd pitched every time the issue of space came up while blowing up her bed the night before.

"Why can't you live with your old roommate?" Nicki asked, clacking the heel of their shoe against the tile in an effort to bring attention back to them. "Is anyone going to spill the tea on that?"

"No," Wallace and Willow answered in concert.

* * *

After waiting for Nicki to leave and timing routines so that he and Willow didn't have to be in the room as either of them was changing, Wallace left his dorm hall to make the short trip toward Myrrh Hall for his first class. Double checking his schedule to ensure that fate had, in fact, made him attend Sutcliffe's class first thing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he handed off the paper to elgyem who studied the sheet as they followed a straight path to the building.

The interior brought back uneasy memories. The carpet was the color of dried blood and the walls were off-white mixed with wood paneling along the walls that held classrooms. He didn't have to check the time to know he'd cut it close to being late as every seat in the room was filled except for one near the back. Harsh glares waited for him the moment he stepped into his ethics class, surely his classmates were each anticipating for one of their friends to walk in and be the last student.

Attempting to avoid direct eye contact with anyone, Wallace crossed the room to the steps, thankful he'd made it on time to avoid being made to stand in the hall during the class period, all for Sutcliffe to make an example out of him as he'd done the year prior.

On his way up the tiers to the back of the class, he caught several boys glaring his way while a girl across the room was waving, frantic in an attempt to get someone's attention. He raised his head for a second, hoping not to catch any more hateful looks, but before he could find the waving girl, he saw Astrid across the room, the planes of her face illuminated by her tablet screen. She hadn't looked his way, but he flashed the girl a smile and found a few other familiar faces near her. Tempest tapped a pencil against her desk while Ben kept his head down beside her. Behind the two of them sat Kit, already scribbling something down in his notebook.

Unfortunately, his seat couldn't have been near them or at the end of the aisle, which meant shuffling past people's desks and getting up and close and personal with their visual disgust in him until he found his desk. Wallace dropped his bag by his feet and pulled elgyem into his lap, letting out a loud sigh that caused a guy in front of him to turn around and sneer.

"Good morning everyone," Professor Sutcliffe said as he strolled into the classroom and pulled the door shut behind him, the sound of the lock engaging sounded a lot like a prison sentence to Wallace. In a swift motion, Sutcliffe dropped a briefcase on the table at the front of the room and pulled on an overhead string that revealed his name written on the chalkboard. "My name is Dr. Aloysius Sutcliffe and I'll be your instructor for Research 220: Pokémon Theory and Ethics this semester. However, I won't be the only one teaching you in this class. This semester I'm joined by two teaching assistants. They'll be with us all semester working with me to better educate you. Both of these ladies have done exceptionally well in my classes and I'm pleased to have them join us."

The class started to murmur and even Wallace sat up in his seat and began to scan the classroom. He couldn't see much aside from the backs of people's heads, but as he tried to pick out anyone that looked out of place, two girls near the front left side of the room slid out of their chairs and joined Sutcliffe at his desk.

"This is Alexia Violette, a junior, and Eleanor Ampora, a senior, both of whom are here to help you, so don't be afraid to ask them questions as if the were extensions of my own brain," Sutcliffe said. "Ladies," he said, gesturing them forward.

Wallace's jaw dropped as Eleanor and Alexia waved to the class and he realized Alexia had been the one waving at him. Wallace moved to reach for his bag, thinking about letting Mila out to surprise Eleanor, but stopped when he realized it'd only serve to draw more attention to himself.

"Hi! I'm Alexia, you can call me Lexi," Alexia said, waving to the class again. She looped her fingers through belt loops in a pair of ripped jean shorts and brought Wallace's attention to a belt that carried her poké balls and several purple plastic containers. "Um, I'm a junior, a research major, and I work part-time as a lifeguard for the University. I also love the water," she said, pointing her thumbs at her shirt, a simple black top with white writing across the chest, _'_ _b_ _etter where it's wetter'_.

Eleanor gave a short wave to the room before she took to twisting her silver locket. "I'm Ellie, a senior, also a research major. I'm a resident advisor for Rose-Absolute Hall, so you can usually find me there," she said before she shrugged and smiled to Sutcliffe. "I think that's it."

"Thank you," Sutcliffe said, gently ushering the girls back to their seats. "This semester," he continued as he smoothed down his bushy grey hair, "we'll be digesting the works of other professors, specifically the works of the top pokémon professors for each region. I've chosen written works by Oak, Elm, Juniper, Birch, and Rowan for us to go through. We'll be reading one a week and with fifteen weeks in this semester, that's fifteen theories. In order to get a more hands-on experience in recognizing and theories and ethics in our world in regards to pokémon each of you will be writing your own thesis, the topic of which have already been decided."

Watching his classmates take in everything Sutcliffe said, Wallace reached for his bag and pulled a notebook out and started to jot down the major points of his lesson plan. While some groaned at the intense reading schedule and their first major assignment, Wallace kept quiet, not willing to draw Sutcliffe's attention to him, or anyone else's for that matter.

Sutcliffe turned to the chalkboard, to a piece of paper taped beside his name. "While everyone will be writing their own thesis, you'll be working in pairs, competing with your partner to prove your thesis as factual. I've already assigned partners, organizing times for working together is all on you, but each thesis needs to be forty pages." Sutcliffe grabbed a stick of chalk and in his signature heavy-handed script started writing out the essay topics, followed by a hyphen, and then the pairs.

Wallace didn't recognize most of the names going on the board, not surprising, he thought, considering this was typically a first-year class and only sophomores who thought they could avoid it ended up taking it during their second year, or cases like himself who simply failed.

A pair of girls groaned after being assigned the science behind poké ball mechanics, while a mixed pair seem pleased after Sutcliffe assigned them the task of determining who the first pokémon is. Tempest and Kit were assigned to take down popular pre-existing theories about the origin of some pokémon while he and Ben were paired together to craft a theory about the origin of pokémon classified as extraterrestrials. Eleanor and Astrid were given an assignment about the origin of ghost pokémon which seemed like the easiest to Wallace, but he didn't make a sound about it like some of his classmates.

Looking down, Wallace saw his pen moving on its own as elgyem waved his hand side to side, scratching the pen tip across the page making a crude circle and a lopsided square. As Sutcliffe continued to list off the pairs, Wallace grabbed another pen and started to draw shapes with elgyem. He tuned out forty minutes of Sutcliffe explaining the details of the assignments to teach elgyem to draw better circles and straight lines until they were dismissed.

"Before you leave, I want to show you something," Sutcliffe said, pointing to the room's left wall. The entirety of the wall was taken up by small cork boards with student names pinned across the top. "As a bit of positive reinforcement, I'll be posting copies of all papers that get A's in the class to each student's board. At the end of the semester, the three students with the most number of papers tacked to their board will be exempt from the final."

The class mumbled at Sutcliffe's announcement and everyone seemed excited about the idea of getting out of taking the final as they left. Hoping to get to Ben, Wallace felt a little miffed as he watched his partner vanish from the room without a moment's hesitation. As he waited for the class to clear out he shot Ben a quick text asking to meet him later and dropped his notebook in his bag, but before he could zip it a foot swung in his direction and kicked the bag over.

"Oh, my bad," a boy said as he stepped on the bag and then down the aisle.

Wallace sighed watching the contents of his bag spill out onto the level below his. He waited for the students around him to leave before he moved to gather his stuff. He scooped up his notebooks while elgyem gathered his pencils and pens and dropped them into the bag. "Thanks," he mumbled as the room emptied, not even Eleanor or Alexia had stayed behind. He swung his bag on and made his way down the aisle as Sutcliffe started erasing the pairs and assignments. Before he cleared the door, he heard Sutcliffe clap his hands and call out to him.

"Mr. Pearce, can we talk?" he asked.

Wallace bit the inside of his cheek as he retraced his steps and stopped in front of the professor's desk.

Sutcliffe seemed to size him up as he folded his arms over his chest, the muscles in his arms bulging under the fabric. "You look different, I kept scanning the crowd looking for you, but it was your elgyem that gave you away."

Wallace smiled and rubbed elgyem's arm, the psychic-type beeping with glee at being recognized. "My hair," he said, though it wasn't a real answer.

"I was surprised to see your name on the roster," Sutcliffe said. "Other professor's teach this course. I figured you might have decided to take your chances with one of them."

"I did," he said. "All their classes were filled already."

"I understand." Sutcliffe coughed out a laugh and looked at his arms again as he bobbed his head.

"Sorry," Wallace said, realizing how his bluntness might have come off. "It's something new I'm trying, telling the truth."

"No, no, don't apologize," Sutcliffe said, shaking his head and curling his mouth down into a frown. "I spend my days listening to stories about pokémon destroying homework and shortcircuiting alarm clocks, and anything else you can imagine to explain away bad grades and poor attendance, so hearing a student be upfront is refreshing." Sutcliffe fell silent as he looked at his arms again and sighed into his chest. "You know, I never thought I'd have to say 'Mr. Pearce' again," he said. "An educator always knows they've been teaching too long when they run into the children of former students."

Wallace narrowed his eyes on the professor, his jaw hanging open slightly as his mind worked to piece together the man's words. "What?"

Sutcliffe used his hands to make a small circle in the air. "In Sinnoh, there's a tiny little academy, your father attended it when he was a young man," he said. "I ended up as the dean of that school and your father was one of the students I was in charge of. I'm sorry, by the way, for your father's death. I can't imagine that with everything you've gone through that was an easy pill to swallow."

Wallace nodded, though he knew the professor only knew a fraction of what it was he went through. "Thank you, it's been hard."

"Knowing what I know now," Sutcliffe said, rubbing his eyes. "I see a lot of Arlan in you, but the differences in you are glaring as well. Your father was a much better student than you, but I suppose that had something to do with your father attempting to live up to his father's reputation."

"You know my grandfather?" Wallace asked.

Sutcliffe bobbed his head in an odd pattern that Wallace couldn't decide was a yes or no. "We've met once or twice, never on the best of terms. How is he? Despite the nature of our parent-teacher conferences, I held a great respect for Samuel."

"My father moved him to Lumiose when his health started to deteriorate, he's being looked after," Wallace said, thinking of the glass and white stone building that housed his grandfather and other elderly patients whose families couldn't be bothered to look after them personally, but still wanted the best care money could buy.

"Arlan came to school with the intention of living up to his father's expectations," Sutcliffe said. "I don't think you came here with the intention of making your father proud, you and your father differed in that regard. There was much anticipation in Arlan attending that school, lots of attention around his successes. But you're alike in the most tragic of senses," he said. "Like father, like son." Sutcliffe sighed and dropped his arms then walked a quick circle behind his desk and then leaned against the chalkboard. "A young man vanished without a trace at that school in Sinnoh and Arlan was involved. He and some of his friends were suspects. He was younger than you at the time and I could see it tormenting him as the years passed. My only regret in life was not taking more action back then and reaching out to Arlan to help him. I wanted to apologize for giving you a hard time last year," he said. "My office is always open if you need someone to talk to."

"Thank you," Wallace said, again, unsure of what to say or do in response to the verbal bombshell.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Pearce," Sutcliffe said. "Go, I don't want you to be late for your next class."

Wallace nodded to the man as he left. Acting on auto-pilot he left the building and headed straight for the stadium for his next class. Part of him wanted to turn back or wished he'd stayed to talk to Sutcliffe more as he knew next to nothing about his father's earlier life. Despite being one of the most talked about men in the world, details of what Arlan's life had been before catapulting himself to the top of the world was shrouded in mystery. A scandal during his time as a student never occurred to Wallace and as he walked the perimeter of the stadium, passing students and their pokémon who were racing toward the field, he wanted nothing more than to get the name of that school in Sinnoh.

* * *

Later that night, following his training lab, Wallace leaned back against the stone steps leading toward the ICO's lobby, the heel of his sneaker pressed to the ground as he rocked his leg from side to side. The evening's blanket of sounds filled the space around him, illuminated by a single aureate bulb over his head.

"Anything?" he asked, letting his head roll to the side where elgyem sat with his cell phone.

Elgyem shook his head and pressed the home button, bringing the screen to life to showcase no messages or calls had come through despite Ben agreeing to meet at the ICO for their project. "Elgy," the psychic-type replied, handing Wallace's phone back as he pulled a notepad and Wallace's pen back to him and started drawing circles and lines again.

Wallace smiled, watching elgyem's circles gradually turn from squiggles to nearly solid lines. "Keep practicing," he said as he glanced at his phone's screen again, half past nine, the digital clock read.

Letting his head fall back, Wallace's eyes tracked from the side of the building to the roof's edge. A morbid collection finite thoughts popped into his mind, each one replacing the other the moment he focused on it. The rooftop was the last solid surface Arlette stood on. He was the last person she saw alive. Her pokémon's last memory of her was something random and inconsequential, nothing meaningful or heartfelt like goodbyes should be, and the same could be said for her last moment with Garret.

The culmination of thoughts made his arms go weak and Wallace let his hands drag across the stone until he laid back on the steps, his eyes falling from the roof to the windows of the lobby. The inside of the lobby was nearly empty except for a girl sitting at the attendant desk, bent over something as a pencil in her hand worked tirelessly in her hand. Focusing, Wallace rolled over and narrowed his eyes, sure that it was Eleanor inside.

Wallace crawled up the steps and got to his feet in front of the door and flashed his ID. "Elgy," he said, holding the door open for elgyem to glide inside, notepad and pen trailing after him.

The lobby brought back odd memories of his incomplete year on campus. It looked the same, a coffee table and sparse furniture by the window and an attendant's desk across from it with a stairwell leading to the basement and another leading to bedrooms. Elgyem wasted no time in flying toward the table and placing himself in the center to resume his practice of lines and circles while Wallace crept across the room and smacked his hands on the desk. Eleanor yelped, her pencil flying from her grip as she nearly lost her balance on the stool she'd been perched on.

"Wallace!" Eleanor sighed and clutched her chest, sighing and trying to calm her breathing. "You scared me!"

"Sorry. You were in the zone, couldn't help it," he said, craning his neck around to see a coloring book spread out in front of her on the desk. A half-colored pictured of a pokémon Wallace had only ever seen in mythology books was printed in the center of the page. "I can see why."

"Care you join me?" she asked, reaching for a box of colored pencils and pulling out a bright blue one. "I'll let you color victini's eyes."

"No thanks," he said. "I just sat on those steps for half an hour waiting on Ben and I can't take any more stationary activity."

Eleanor shrugged as she grabbed a darker blue from the box and started an outline around victini's eyes. "Who's Ben?"

Wallace nibbled at the inside of his lip as he watched Eleanor move onto outlining the other eye. "He's in our ethics class," he said. "But he's quiet, you probably didn't notice him."

"I guess so," she replied, sticking her tongue out as she struggled to keep her color inside the thick black lines. "You sure you don't want to join me? It's pretty fun," she said, sitting back after finishing the outlines and wagging the lighter blue pencil at him.

Wallace sighed and grabbed the pencil, only to turn it back on her and bop the top of her head. "I'm sure. Raincheck?"

Eleanor snatched the pencil back and flipped several pages ahead in her book to a print of dialga. "Here, I'll save this one for you," she said as she scribbled his name in the margin.

"Thanks," he said as he backed away. "I won't forget about it. Elgy, let's go." Wallace waved to Eleanor as he reached the door, but stopped when his hands touched the bar. Due to the lack of sunlight ahead of him, Eleanor's reflection seemed crystal clear in the glass in front of his nose. The sight a carefree Eleanor, drawing in a coloring book, should have made him feel equally at ease, but the sight only dug out a crater in his gut and filled his mouth with a stale taste. "Eleanor?"

"Yeah?" she asked, popping up in her seat again.

"I don't want you to get in trouble."

Eleanor's shoulders dropped as she snorted out a laugh. "For coloring? I can color and still do my job, don't worry about me."

Wallace watched her wave off his concern and go back to coloring, but cool dismal only made a pit in his stomach deepen. "With Neo."

Silence filled the lounge, but in the reflection, he saw Eleanor's hand slow before she laid the pencil down. Beside him he watched elgyem glance between the two of them, his hands flashing a dim yellow in the process.

"You and Neo are big boys, and I'm a big girl," she said finally. "I don't need to pick friendships over a relationship. When I'm with Neo I leave when he starts talking bad about you or force a change of conversation. And when you're around I don't have to worry about you talking about Neo because that's not who you are. It can all work out for everyone like this. Now, get out of here before I make you color this page with me!"

It wasn't cold, but Wallace shivered as he stepped outside and paused on the steps as the Bellerose Courtyard ahead of him wasn't as deserted as it'd been before he went inside. Half a dozen figures were gathered outside the courtyard, each of them carrying a candle, their bodies hidden by dark cloaks that dragged the floor and covered their heads.

"Wallace."

Taking cautious steps to the ground, Wallace frozen at one of the figures tossed their hood off and migrated away from the herd. Once their candle came closer to their face he could make out the freckles and coils of hair that he'd begun to recognize as belonging to Julian.

"Did you come to join the ceremony?" he asked.

Wallace took another step, though remained quiet, eyes darting to elgyem in his periphery. If worse came to worse and the encounter turned into something cultish involving sacrifices and ancient symbols drawn in blood he could ask elgyem to teleport him away. "Uh," he said, unable to focus on replying with an actual word.

"Julian, we're ready to start." Two more figures moved away from the group as others in cloaks began to fill in the courtyard, packing in near the exits which made the outdoor space feel somehow claustrophobic.

Wallace pressed his lips together as the two figures dropped their hoods as well, revealing themselves to be Reed and Don. Wallace's eyes skipped over Reed to take in Don's round and delicate features atop a dark ceremonious cloak, the complete image not quite making sense to his brain.

"I was seeing if Wallace was going to join tonight," Julian said, looking eagerly at Reed. "We have an extra cloak for him."

Elgyem drifted over Wallace's shoulder and extended a hand to Don, his hand lighting up green at the boy. With a gentle push, Wallace lowered elgyem's hand as he saw Don sneering at the light being shined at him. "I was just passing by," he said, his throat dry and his voice weak. Desperate for an open space, Wallace pulled elgyem along to the right side of the courtyard and started inching past the gathered NRR members.

"The Religious Center is always open if you need to talk to someone!" Julian called out.

Wallace tossed a hand over his head as he broke through the crowd and power walked down the path beside the ICO. Feeling panicked and unable to catch his breath, Wallace started running from the building. A pokémon roar startled him for a second as he ran into the middle of a transport path and a man on a rhyhorn's back shouted at him, but he didn't stop until he was on the docks. With nothing but wood planks surrounding him, every direction looked nearly the same, but he followed his ears and thudded toward the bay. Elgyem beeped from behind him, each time getting more intense and occasionally Wallace saw the psychic-type's lights illuminating the space around him.

Still, he didn't dare stop as no distance seemed like enough until his shoes splashed in the shallows of the bay. Water lapping his toes caused him to back away from the water until his heel caught a rock and he landed with a thud on the sand, his back finding a smooth rock.

Beyond small hills, in the sand, the froth of the bay kissed the shore before it receded into the massive blue-purple body of water. Across the bay, dark patches of water formed and vanished as the water moved and created small waves where the fractured moonlight couldn't reach. Wallace focused on the low clouds on the horizon, their thin forms barely shielding the crescent hanging just as low in the sky.

In a time not too distant, the openness of the beach, the poor visibility of sitting in the open at night would have terrified him, but the expanse didn't bother him anymore. Neither did the eerie silence in moments when the waves were quiet. Something about the beach, possibly the lack of buildings or people around him, or the general lack of humanity's influence in sight comforted him. The dependable movement of the waves allowed him to focus his eyes and his mind, giving him the chance to place one thought in order of another and clean up his thoughts. Neo, Eleanor, Don, Reed, the NRR, Arlette, all of it felt like a lethal dose without some room for escape.

The sound of soft steps, feet meeting sand and invading his little slice of heaven forced Wallace away from his own thoughts. Elgyem noticed the intruder before him and lit the beach up with red light. It was a girl with long hair that swept over her eyes and fell to her waist with light eyes that under elgyem's light made her look almost alien.

A pair of tattered jean shorts hugged her tights while a low-top sneaker dug into the sand. Wallace could make out the outline of a bra beneath a see-through shirt, but as elgyem's light died down her undergarment was slightly less prominent.

"Wallace?" she asked, combing her fingers through her bangs as she moved in and crouched a few feet away. "What's up?"

"Alexia?" he asked, in a hushed, husky whisper, not wanting to break the reigning din of the waves.

The girl smiled as she sat down, folding one leg under her and stretching the other out. "You can call me Lexi. What's going on? Unless there's an event going on no one is usually here when I'm out." Alexia puckered her lips as her head bobbed toward Wallace. "Though we did meet while you were skinny dipping, so I don't know why I'm surprised. Did I interrupt that tonight?"

Wallace shook his head, the idea of his nightly bath not occurring to him. "Just trying to think."

Alexia's outstretched leg bobbed from side to side as she nodded. "I come here for that too. Lots of good things happen on beaches and in their surrounding waters."

As the silence between lapping waves fell over them Wallace looked down the beach when elgyem nudged his shoulder. Several yards away a slowpoke lumbered across the beach, dragging its belly through the damp sand.

"Gy, gy?" Elgyem asked, humming as he gestured to himself and the laggard slowpoke. Elgy jabbed at the air around Wallace's book bag before he brought his arms together and began to crank them open and shut like jaws.

"Wink is at home with Mila," Wallace said, recognizing elgyem's sign language for totodile. "You can play with spinarak," he said, shrugging his bag off and tugging the zipper open. Wallace laid the bag between his knees as he rummaged through, bypassing textbooks and school supplies to where his poké balls usually tumbled to the bottom of his bag, but found nothing outside loose pens and sticks of gum.

A spike of panic struck Wallace as he pulled back and started from the top again. He shoved aside two books, three notebooks, a folder and several sheets of loose paper and pulled the bag's opening as wide as he could to peer inside. "Elgy, I need light," he said, his mind blanking out of fear.

Elgyem hovered over and plopped down on his head and dangled his hand over the bag, his yellow lights flashing on and illuminating the bag's interior.

Wallace narrowed his eyes at the collection of useless crap at the bottom of the bag, the same contents he'd felt the first time. Pencils, pens, gum, some scraps of paper and a paper clip, nothing else. No poké ball.

The sound of plastic clacking together and air blowing brought Wallace's attention to Alexia with a container of bubble soap in hand and it bubble wand to her lips. "Everything okay?" she asked, several small bubbles drifting down and popping on her legs.

"I can't – I can't find one of my pokémon, he was in his ball all day, in my bag," Wallace knocked his bag over and grabbed the bottom, spilling the contents onto the beach. He shook the bag and peered inside again before he tossed it aside. "He's not here," he said, his voice sharp and harsh, slapping his textbooks over and flicking the writing utensils away. "If I leave one of my team behind I always leave another with them so they're not alone, my totodile and litleo are together so I brought elgyem and spinarak with me, but he's not here!"

Alexia shoved the bubble wand back into the container and twisted the lid as she got to her feet. "It's okay, calm down, I'll help you find him. Where have you been today?"

Wallace squeezed his eyes shut, wishing Alexia would go away. He ran his hands through the tangles of his hair, blending sand into his hair as he pressed into his temples and tried to take her advice. "Class, the stadium, the ICO, here, and the café."

"Okay, when was the last time you saw the ball in your bag?"

Class. Wallace had just enough time to think about Sutcliffe's class before he was on his feet and shoveling sand and his school supplies back into his bag. "Someone kicked my bag over when I was leaving class this morning, that's the only time it could have fallen out," he said, slinging the much heavier bag onto his back and trotting up the beach.

* * *

"What? The school is cursed?" Wallace wrapped his hands around the cool metal door handle to Myrrh Hall, but stopped to find Alexia on the steps behind him.

"I mean, besides all the awful things that happen to the students? Yeah, people say it's haunted," she said, rubbing her arm as she glanced from side to side, though they didn't encounter a single student on their way from the beach. "One of the classes in the basement here is where a mythology class meets and there are these models of mythical pokémon. One of my girlfriends said she left her notebook behind last year and when she went back to get it all the models were moved from their original spots and were staring at her. Spooky, right?"

Wallace looked to elgyem on his shoulder, the psychic-type shrugged and Wallace mimicked him. "I mean, someone could have moved them to clean them," Wallace said, giving the door a test pull. To his surprise, the door opened with ease.

"Okay!" Alexia said, taking a step up the stairs. "But what about the bridge? There's a classroom in there and people have said they've heard the projector coming down at night as well as footsteps!"

"That could be anything," Wallace said, pulling on the door and swinging it open. "Are you coming in, or are you scared? You can wait outside if you want, I'll just run to class and look for the ball, Elgy can help me."

Elgyem lit Alexia up in green light that seemed to startle her before he slid off Wallace's shoulder and flew inside, pulling open the second door with his powers.

"I'm not staying out here! And I'm not scared, I'm excited!" Alexia said, storming into the building. "You haven't even heard the worse of the hauntings. One of the cleaning staff that cleans the buildings at night said they saw someone in this building late at night in one of the classrooms talking to the room."

"A co-worker maybe?" Wallace asked as he followed Alexia into the main hallway. Aside from looking dim, the building seemed the same. With the overhead lights off only a tall lamp to the left of the entry illuminated the hall and shone a light on the numbered plates by each door. Each of the doors ahead of them was closed and the hallways that led to additional classrooms were shrouded in darkness. "Let's just find spinarak's ball," he said, crossing the hall and twisting the knob to Sutcliffe's room. "I'll leave solving the mysteries of the school to someone else."

Inside, Wallace flipped the switch and the lights above them flickered on, filling the air with a low buzzing sound. He wasted no time in charging up the steps to find his seat and start scanning the floor. "My stuff fell over here and kind of spilled out, maybe it rolled down."

"Okay," Alexia said, moving between desks on the levels below Wallace.

Elgyem floated overhead, shining his lights on the space between desks, beeping lowly every few seconds while Wallace scooted around on his hands and knees, shoving desks aside.

Working as a team and covering every row and space, it wasn't long before Alexia gasped and Wallace shot up and smacked his head on the bottom of the desk. The back of his head bellowed with sudden pain as he crawled from under the desk. "What?"

"I think I found it," she said, holding a ball up. She touched the locking mechanism and spinarak emerged from the beam of light.

Wallace's jaw dropped as a spray of webbing flew overhead and attached to the ceiling. Before he had a chance to get to his feet spinarak swung from the line and smacked against Wallace's face and skittered to the top of his head.

"Spi! Spi!" he chittered, moving in a circle on the crown of Wallace's head.

Chills crawled down Wallace's spine at the feeling of spinarak's legs against his scalp, a feeling he didn't think he could miss so much. "I'm sorry it took me so long to notice you weren't with me," he said, rubbing spinarak's back. "I lost track of time waiting for Ben and then – " Wallace fell silent, choosing to skip over seeing the NRR in their cloaks about to make contact with the dead.

"Aww, a sweet reunion," Alexia said, grinning. "I guess since you're not in the mood for solving mysteries we can get out of here now that you found him." She hopped down to the main floor and headed for the door, her fingers fluttering over the light switches.

Wallace waited for elgyem to take place on his shoulder before he joined Alexia by the door and stepped into the hall. Outside he was thrown into a new kind of darkness that felt enveloping, but also vast due to the large windows ahead of him that let in the natural darkness that layered on top of the lack of light in the hallway.

"Wasn't it light out here a few minutes ago?" Alexia asked. "Why'd it get so dark?"

A flash of green light shone a spotlight on the lamp by the door as elgyem pointed to it. The three bulb lamp had been glowing bright when they arrived, but now sat covered by darkness.

"Did it burn out?" Alexia asked as she moved past Wallace to the lamp. She looked over the small stand and long pole, dipping out of sight before she came up and tried one of its switches. Without hesitation, the top light turned on and made a small arc of light against the wall. Alexia looked to Wallace and then back to the lamp as she tried the other switches, each turning on without a problem.

"They work," Wallace said, dryly. With light once again aiding their eyes, Wallace looked up and down the hall. At first glance, nothing aside from the light caught Wallace's eye until he focused on a door several classrooms down from Sutcliffe's, across from the lamp, and the fact that it was open. "Lexi, weren't all the doors shut when we came in?"

"Heh, you're right," she said, waggling her fingers through the air. "I told you this school was haunted," Alexia whispered, her eyes scanning the ceiling.

Wallace grimaced, but it was impossible to ignore the possibility that ghost pokémon lived in the building and took the opportunity to have some fun whenever trainers weren't around. "Ghosts are everywhere, probably."

"It's not a ghost," Alexia said. "Look, the door that's open is right across from the lamp."

"What does that have to do with anything?" he asked, rubbing his knuckles together. Wallace fell silent as he looked over the hall again. The lamp and the door were the closest things to the door while Sutcliffe's classroom was several yards away, mostly out of sight unless you were looking for the room in particular.

"Tell me if you can see anything," Alexia said, backing up into Sutcliffe's room quickly and shutting the door.

Wallace moved toward the center of the hall and waited for something, anything to happen, but nothing seemed to change in the hall.

"See anything?" Alexia asked through the door.

"No!" he yelled back. "What am I looking for?"

"Turn off the lamp," she said.

Wallace furrowed his brow as he backed up to the lamp and flipped the switch, plunging the hall back into darkness. "I still don't see anything, not to mention the fact that it's completely dark out here!" he said. "The light from the classroom is the only thing that helps." A sliver of yellow light from the under the door cast a scant glow across the floor, it didn't compare to the lamp. Behind him, moonlight added very little illumination through the windows.

Alexia burst through the door, startling Wallace as he turned the lamp back on. "You couldn't tell I had the lights on when the lamp was on, could you?"

Wallace's mouth hung open slightly as she shook her head. "No, the lamp's bulbs are brighter, but without it, a little bit of light through the window in the door came through. It was still hard to see."

"Your pokémon are ready to battle, right?" Alexia asked, looking at elgyem who blinked back and then tipped his head toward Wallace.

"Of course, do we need them?" he asked.

"We might," she said, running her hand along her belt of poké balls. "Because if I'm right, ghosts aren't the problem. There's someone in here that shouldn't be here, doing things they shouldn't be doing."

"What?" Wallace rasped, shooting across the hall to Alexia's side. "I thought we agreed it was all ghosts?"

"Yeah, but the light," she said. "It's across from the room with the open door. If someone was in the classroom before we got here, they might have been the one to turn the light on and when they were done doing... whatever it was they came to do, they turned the light off. Then they noticed light from our classroom."

"Are they still here?" he asked.

"Maybe," she said. "Does your elgyem sense anything? Or maybe hear anything?"

Elgyem sat up straight and roved his head from side to side, the lights on his hands flashing in sequence. After moments of observing the hall, he lifted off from Wallace's shoulder and flew in a slow circle over Wallace's head, pointing his hands in different directions, beeping low every time he checked a new area.

Alexia gasped and Wallace's eyes jerked away from elgyem to find Alexia clutching a poké ball to her chest, eyes focused at the end of the hall. To their left was a partition, a split wall of glass windows that sectioned off the hall. "I just saw someone through the glass watching us!"

Elgyem flew forward, lights making a trail behind him as he headed for the glass and started flying in circles again, shining his lights in every direction.

Wallace inched down the hall with Alexia on his heels. He stopped short of the glass wall and watched as elgyem's lights lit up the hall. While they didn't compare to the usefulness of a flashlight, his red light illuminated far enough down the hall that Wallace could tell no one was nearby.

"Anyone there?" Alexia asked, clutching the glass as she peered around to follow Wallace's cue. "Maybe I saw something else, or the shadows are playing tricks on me."

"Em, em! Elgy!" Elgyem flew to the glass and tapped his hand against it before he moved his hand in a circle over a smudged piece of glass.

Wallace looked at the glob of cloudy glass shaped like nothing in particular. The closer he moved toward it the more he angled his head until his cheek touched the glass and he was nearly at eye level with the smudge. "Someone was here," he said quietly as he pulled away from the glass, his own cheek leaving a similar smudge on the glass. "Someone stood here and watched us for a moment before they ran away. Their skin smudged the glass."

"Oh wow," Alexia breathed. "Someone really is in here with us, acting shady."

"Let's just go, we found spinarak," Wallace said, grabbing the sleeve of Alexia's shirt. "If someone is here they shouldn't be and we can just tell public safety or a professor tomorrow. This isn't for us to figure out."

Alexia kept her eyes on the hall ahead of her, staring at nothing but darkness as far as Wallace could see without elgyem's help. Anything or anyone could be waiting in the shadows, but something seemed to urge Alexia keep exploring, but at Wallace's suggestion she turned away. "You're right," she said. "I do just want to check one more thing, the classroom they were in."

Wallace groaned as she headed down the hall again and stopped at the class with its door open. Wallace followed after her, but stayed outside as she entered and flipped the switch to find a room just like Sutcliffe's, tiered with large student desks and a professor's table at the front. Peering inside, nothing about the desks struck him as odd and the room itself seemed normal, empty, and quiet, but as he turned to leave the dirty chalkboard caught his eye.

While it was possible the professor who last used the room did a quick job at erasing the board, another possibility occurred to him. Whoever had been inside had used the board and erased it when they left, though no clue of what they might have written remained.

Alexia flipped the lights off and Wallace stepped back into the hall when a human-sized figure in his periphery froze him in place. Alexia bumped into him and gasped, which caused the figure standing by the exit to swing the door open and do the same to the second set and rush outside.

"Wallace, someone really was here with us!" Alexia said. "Someone was really here with us!"

Wallace's jaw fell as he watched the figure spring down the walkway in front of the building, their head covered by the hood of a jacket and their face never in full fight as they darted straight ahead.

* * *

End of Chapter Forty

* * *

 _AN: Two weeks ago we passed the two year anniversary of Yearning being published here, which is very exciting to me. Thank you to everyone who reads and enjoys._

 **Question of the Chapter #40:** What do you think the NRR is really about?


	41. Me, You, Him

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Forty-One – You, Me, and Him**

 _Time for you and time for me – T.S. Eliot_

* * *

As a child whose any wish and whim, whatever he could think of, was fulfilled without question, Wallace couldn't grasp the idea of being thankful. Gratitude was a lost concept on him as his father shielded him from the adverse points of life. But by Thursday of his first week back, sitting in the back of Professor Till's trainer technology class, with Neo sitting several rows ahead of him, he felt an appreciation for assigned seating of all things.

As the professor, dressed in grey slacks, a white shirt, and his signature silk tie, worked at his desk, Wallace was thankful for the day of busy work. The class syllabus stated most of their assignments would be handled in groups of two, which Professor Till hadn't finished assigning so they had the day to take notes and become familiar with their possible assignment topics

Wallace finished writing the current and most accepted formula for determining a pokémon's health stat as Professor Till's skiddo made a loop past his table. Pulling out his phone, Wallace turned on his camera and snapped several burst shots of the grass-type as she pranced by. He couldn't recall the professor letting his pokémon roam last year, but when he arrived to class Eleanor the skiddo was the first one to greet him.

He dropped his phone onto his notebook, used his finger to scribble a message across the picture and sent it to Eleanor, awaiting her reply.

At the thought of Eleanor, Wallace turned his eyes to the front right corner of the room where Neo shared a table with Astrid. Through the gap between their bodies, he could see their tablets laid out in front of them, their fingers tapping away madly. He watched until Astrid typed something in and then folded his arms. Seconds passed until Neo bent over his tablet and then rocketed back, cupping his mouth in an attempt to cover wheezing laughter.

A muted reflection of red light across his table drew Wallace's attention to the seat beside him. Where one of his classmates might have sat, if any liked him, elgyem had taken and had been practicing drawing his circles and straight lines. But as Wallace followed his line of sight he knew Elgy had been watching Neo and Astrid as well.

"I know," he said, rubbing the back of elgyem's head.

Nearly a week had passed since his battle with Neo, and despite elgyem showing no lasting signs of damage from Neo's thunder attack, the memory of it seemed to haunt them both. If he closed his eyes Wallace could still see the jagged lightning bolt coming down and watching elgyem flash his lights at Neo he knew his pokémon had a more traumatic memory in mind when he saw Neo.

Neo's lack of regard for what harm he might inflict, like Nat, who seemed all too eager to fatally wound Julian's mightyena, shed light on the violence capable through battles. Battles he'd played spectator to on-campus were nothing like the ones shown on television or that he'd watched through Andrew's PokéView streams. Still, nothing Neo or Nat did could compare to what the Orphans were capable of.

The sound of a textbook slapping against a nearby table jolted Wallace into a memory that rose his skin into bumps. A lopsided stack of marble stones flashed through his mind, crushing the skull of James' garchomp. Another slapping sound, louder that time, snapped Wallace back to the scene in the classroom.

He was still stroking elgyem's head, but as he looked around the room, he realized the mood of the room had changed. No one was working independently anymore, everyone's eyes were on him and Professor Till was in the process of dropping a textbook on his table.

"What?" he asked.

"I getting ready for more drastic measures to see if you were paying attention," Professor Till said, the top of his head of dark curls illuminated by the light of an overhead projector. "I'm detailing the first assignment, you need to find a partner, Mr. Pearce."

A familiar feeling of fear and dread bubbled in Wallace's stomach as he watched his classmates turn back to the front of the room. Most of them were already sitting in pairs, but a few had switched seats to find partners. Neo and Astrid hadn't moved and at the table behind him, Ignatius and Shannon were gathered in a huddle.

Like a lost child, Wallace whipped his head side to side, faintly scanning the faces and bodies around him, desperately seeking for a friendly face, but everyone was either a strange blur or someone he'd only seen once or twice before but never bothered to make conversation with. He was sure most people felt the same as him, dreading group assignments, but his lack of favor on campus kept him glued to his seat, he knew how desperate he would have looked asking anyone to be his partner.

"Gyyy!"

Wallace whirled back around in his seat to find elgyem behind lifted out of his seat and placed on the table as someone slid into the chair beside Wallace. The sight stunned him, someone voluntarily placing themselves at his table and therefore aligning themselves with the campus pariah.

"Hey, partner," Cole said as he scooted into the table.

"Hi," Wallace said, breathless as he watched elgyem light Cole up with his red lights as he stomped his feet. "I think you're sitting on something."

Cole's dark brows shot up as he leaned over in the chair and reached under him. A second later he pulled elgyem's drawing paper and a pencil from the chair. "Sorry," he said, handing off the supplies to the psychic-type who snatched them and stormed off to the far corner of the table to continue working.

Despite elgyem's temper, Wallace kept his eyes locked on Cole long after the upperclassman turned his own attention to the front of the room.

"No one likes to be the last one picked for a team in gym class," Cole said, under his breath. "So, what topic are we picking?" he asked as their eyes met and his face fell. "Why are you smiling like that?"

Blinking, Wallace sat back in his seat and stretched out his jaw, clearing away the signs of a smile he wasn't aware of. "Nothing, no reason," he said, reaching for something to busy his hands. He moved his notebook across the tabletop before he spun it. His pen went flying into oblivion.

For a reason he couldn't narrow down, Cole's act of kindness made him feel weightless. Nothing below his neck felt like it existed anymore, just a detached flesh machine pumping blood. Cole... Wallace thought, his inner voice trailing off as he realized he couldn't think of Cole's last name and try as hard as he could he couldn't think of a single time they'd had a friendly run-in. In the safari training exercise last year Cole's team of upperclassmen opposed him and he'd done everything he could to torment Ben into peeing himself. Though Ben got the last laugh by stealing the winning keys from Cole and winning the challenge, but aside from run-ins across campus they'd never really talked. But all of that made his unexpected and unnecessary act of kindness in Wallace's favor that much more surprising. Wallace didn't let his mind wander into thoughts of a friendship and not eating lunch alone in his room yet, but he was happy.

"I think we're going to wrap up the class for today," Professor Till said from his desk as he ruffled the fur between his skiddo's antlers. "Make sure you and your partner on the same page as far as the assignment goes, I'll see you all on Tuesday."

"Give," Cole said, pulling Wallace's notebook away as he pulled a pencil from behind his ear.

One the overhead screen were dozens of assignment topics, more than enough so the odds of pairs picking the same topic was slim. Wallace watched Cole use his pencil to draw imaginary lines through the options before apparently finding one he liked as he took to jotting down the title in the now shared notebook.

"The science behind technical machines," Cole said. "Sound like a plan?"

"Yeah!" he said, a little too enthusiastically as it drew Neo's eye from the front of the room. "My father – " He paused, studying Cole's face as he prepared himself for the typical reaction people gave him whenever Arlan was brought into a conversation. People's eyes turned down and they regarded him with a sad little frown and usually told him how sorry they were, but after a while, people's sympathy turned into something else. Sorry became just another throwaway word because it was better than telling him, _better you than me._ But he didn't see any of that in Cole.

"My father's lab was working on a prototype for a new TM device, it's smaller and uses software over hardware, but it's designed to work with discs too," Wallace said. "We can use that, but I don't have any discs to use with it."

"I've got tons for us," Cole said, waving him off. "Are you free at all today?"

"I've got another class right now," he said, tapping his phone screen. He had ten minutes to make it to the clinic or face Nurse Joie's wrath. "I don't really know what time it ends, it's some kind of special lab in the Health and Wellness Clinic."

"Oh, no way? I think I've got the same class," Cole said, getting up from the desk. "We can head over together."

Wallace waited for the class to empty out as he put his stuff back into his bag, making sure everything was there and zipped up to avoid losing another poké ball. Slinging it onto his back and gathering elgyem, he left the room with Cole.

* * *

"Wallace, I'm glad you took me up on my offer to work at the clinic, even if it is just for the year," Nurse Joie said as she entered the lobby of the Health and Wellness Center. "It makes me happy to see so many of you here, in fact."

Wallace gazed down the line of students he stood in, none of whom he recognized, aside from Cole at his side. But like him, they'd all signed up to become student nurses as part of a work-study program for the school.

"I can't say enough about how much your participation with the Clinic will help us this year," Nurse Joie said as she moved down a line of all female staff members, each dressed similarly in light blue scrubs and white tennis shoes. Some were joined in line by pokémon, a few stood with chansey at their side while one rubbed the floppy ears of a chubby-looking wigglytuff.

"This is a class and a job at the same time, therefore you will be graded on participation, attendance, and your overall performance," Nurse Joie said. "And you each will receive pay based off a weekly wage the University has decided for you."

Nurse Joie moved to the end of her line of nurses and held her arm out to them. "These are my most qualified staff members who will be acting as student-teachers to you all. You'll be paired up, two-to-one, for the year and you'll shadow my nurses and assist them with whatever patients they are currently assigned. I didn't create pairs in advance, so feel free to find a partner and talk to my nurses to find a match. I've got some other work to attend to, but I will be around, track me down if you need anything. I promise you're in good hands."

Nurse Joie waved to both rows before she disappeared back through the lobby doors and into the Clinic. Seconds passed before chatter started up in the lobby as students started to pair up. A pair of loud blonde girls grabbed each other's hands and sprinted across the lobby to a tall blonde nurse who was twirling a stethoscope.

As pairs formed and the number of remaining nurses dwindled Wallace watched like pair up with like. Any pairs of all girls seemed to migrate toward the nurse that matched them physically, while pairs of just boys started to fight over the best-looking nurse and reclusive students usually ended up with the less spirited nurses.

"I saved you once from being picked last, so I might as well do it again," Cole said, grabbing Wallace by the elbow and leading him forward.

Rather than go for any particular nurse, Cole headed straightforward for a short nurse with a thick bob of black hair framing her face and skin the color of sand.

"Looks like I've got my pair," the nurse said as she touched a hand to an embroidered section of her scrubs, **Cheryl** **Morgan** **,** **RN – Radix Health and Wellness Center**. "And you are?"

"Cole Fierosa," Cole said.

"Wallace Pearce," Wallace said as he pointed to his shoulder. "This is Elgy."

At the mention of his name Cheryl studied him with slitted dark eyes, but didn't say anything as she turned to the same doors Joie had left through. "Follow me, let's get to work."

Wallace walked behind Cole and Cheryl in eerie silence, only punctuated by their footfalls, as they made their way down the paneled halls of the Clinic. One look at the building's exterior told Wallace the University had remodeled and expanded over the summer and as Cheryl led them to new turns down halls that looked identical to the one before it made Wallace feel lost in an antiseptic maze.

"Here," Cheryl said, colorlessly, as she gestured to a door at the end of the hall.

Wallace followed Cole into the room that, to his surprise, was unlike any of the others he'd seen, largely in part he guessed, to it being practically brand new. A simple hospital-type bed took up most of the space, with a painted white desk pushed into the corner along with a matching chair. A door connected to the room and through its gap, Wallace made out the indicators of a small bathroom.

"Patients and visitors last year took surveys about what the Clinic could do to improve," Cheryl said, moving toward another door in the room across from the foot of the bed. "They added small rooms for visitors, but more often than not the nurses have used them during extensive operations and procedures. I don't find myself using the spare rooms, but you're free to make this like an office if you want. Your assignment is through there," Cheryl said, gesturing to the other door in the room. "Aside from this first walkthrough, any time you enter you need to be dressed like me. Clean scrubs, clean shoes. We do have a team of minccino that clean and sterile the room, but we take any opportunity to lessen the spread of bacteria that we can."

Cole remained silent as Cheryl led them into a dimly lit room twice as big as the visitor room. Another bed sat in the center of the room surrounded by blinking medical equipment, all of which seemed like it'd fit in perfectly at home on a spaceship. The sound of a soft chime ringing drew elgyem's attention to the bed and the psychic-type motioned to Wallace to look as well.

At the sight of a small shape spread out on the bed, Wallace wanted to stop, but Cheryl kept pace in crossing the room through another door. In the third room, a lab of sorts, Cheryl went through a list of equipment and materials present at rapid fire speed.

As Wallace and elgyem tried to find a piece of equipment that didn't look like it'd come from twenty years in the future, Cheryl gathered and dropped a stack of books onto a metal table for them.

"The hell?" Cole asked, his first words since they'd left the lobby.

"These are notes from other nurses on the patient, as well as all recorded dex entries about the species, even ones not currently used in Kalos," Cheryl said. "Does this seem like too much?"

Wallace looked to elgyem and swallowed his initial response when he saw Cheryl's dark, intelligent eyes on him. The nurse must have noticed his own expression, something mixed with confusion and fear because she sighed and continued to address them after pinching the bridge of her nose.

"This job, this class, isn't for the faint at heart," she said. "To put it bluntly we've had pokémon die under the care of student nurses, simply because the care being provided wasn't enough. No one's at fault really, but it's a lot for students to handle. You won't be alone, I've been assigned to be your aide through the year and we'll be aided by my own aide, Jimmy." Cheryl tapped her finger against the window separating the lab from the sick room and above the bed, Wallace watched something like a tail sway in the air.

The tail, that looked like a white sleeve dipped in red paint hung from the round body of a floating pokémon. At Cheryl's invitation, the pokémon floated from above the bed, and chimed its way to the window, smiling and waving its tail in the process.

"My chimecho is trained to heal my patients, he'll be helping us for this job`," Cheryl said. "Do you want to see your patient?"

Without waiting for a response Cheryl motioned the boys back into the sick room toward the motionless figure on the bed. If not for the machines monitoring a heart rate, Wallace would have thought he was being led to a corpse. Cheryl switched on an overhead lamp and moved to the side.

The tyrogue spread on the bed was immediately recognizable to Wallace, but its appearance jarred him. In every photo or video Wallace had ever seen of tyrogue and its evolution lines portrayed them to be superb examples of physical perfection, something humans admired and used as inspiration. Whether it was for punching power, lower body strength, or a spinning ability that drew the jealousy of dancers from all over the world, tyrogue and its evolutions were favorites among trainers.

The tyrogue before him looked off-colored, its purple flesh lacked the soft tones every artist's depiction used and instead was a sickening shade of pale blue. Its face was gaunt, with deeply sunken in cheeks and bloodless lips. Folds of loose skin lapped around the ridges on tyrogue's head, evident from a lack of fat in its face.

Tyrogue's small body was lined with deep grooves between its ribs where muscles once sat and Wallace noticed the odd shape and saggy appearance of the fighting-type's chest, arms, and legs, possibly from more muscles that had wasted away in its weakened state.

Close to the bed, he could make out the sound of the pokémon's breathing, ragged and harsh, as if it took all of its strength not to slip away.

"These are tyrogue's scans," Cheryl said. "In his current condition, his circulatory system is doing fine, likewise with the nervous system. The other diagnostic scans I've done are showing similar readings."

"So what's wrong with him?" Cole asked, folding his arms as he squinted at a row of machines behind Cheryl, each displaying numeric values for the tests she'd run.

"Lung disease," Cheryl said, flatly.

Wallace's eyes tracked away from the machines to tyrogue's still body. The affliction seemed unfit for a pokémon known for physical strength. What he expected to come from Cheryl's mouth was something to do with broken bones or pulled muscles, things the fighting-type would be known for as it developed.

While Cheryl explained her process of scanning tyrogue's lungs, Wallace moved around the bed to the far wall where square lights were lit behind x-ray scans. The scans of tyrogue's skeleton fascinated Wallace. Despite pokémon coming in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and body types, the sight of the fighting-type's human-like skeletal structure took Wallace to the brink of being speechless.

"Wow," he breathed as he eyes glazed over the thin see-through scans. In spite of tyrogue's physical similarity to humans, every bone in his body looked twice as thick as what seemed reasonable for a human. Wallace's eyes honed in on tyrogue's legs and arms where he found extra bones.

"Tyrogue are born with a special type of bone density along with extra bones in preparation for their evolution," Cheryl said. "Their bones grow thicker and more durable as they age and evolve. When they evolve into one of their final forms, depending on which it is, the extra set of bones move into place to be of use." Cheryl tapped one of the close-up scans of tyrogue's head.

"These bones at the crown of its head will grow if he evolves into a hitmontop. They'll form a spike and the skin around it will do the same, hardening as it spins to make it more durable." Cheryl stepped back from the scans and sighed. "They're a magnificent species, it's a shame this one is in such terrible condition."

"How does a tyrogue get a lung disease?" Cole asked.

"We have his trainer to blame for that," Cheryl said. "This tyrogue was sent to us from Kanto where it worked in a dojo, the nurses overseas did everything they could, but were stumped by its condition and sent him here for treatment."

"To be looked after by a couple kids?" Cole asked, his dark brows shooting up.

Though Wallace didn't agree with Cole's skeptical tone, he found the valid reasoning behind it. If masters in the field of medicine and nursing couldn't help tyrogue, what could two University students with no training do?

Cheryl's eyes narrowed on Cole before she turned to a row of shelves beside the x-ray scans. She tapped her fingers along the spines of large tomes until she pulled one from the row.

"This tyrogue spent a year in a center in Kanto where he was merely kept alive and treated for pain while the nurses tried to figure out what to do. Ultimately they hit a wall and could nothing more than keep tyrogue alive before sending him here." Cheryl said as she chucked the book she'd pulled at Cole. "In three days I managed to scan and diagnose tyrogue's disease."

Cole shrugged and tossed the book to Wallace. The covers opened and the pages flared in mid-air, making it hard to catch and Wallace nearly dropped the book on its spine as he struggled to catch it by the back cover. Rather than a normal book, what Cheryl had given them was a journal of sorts. Every page was originally blank and had been filled in with handwritten notes, charts, checklists, and graphs, all detailing tyrogue's condition.

As he flipped, vaguely listening to Cheryl and Cole's back and forth, Wallace skimmed notes and findings from the original nurses as they made slow progress treating tyrogue. An entire page was dedicated to every symptom tyrogue presented, listed alphabetically, and on the page beside it, each symptom had been paired with a possible disorder.

As he moved further through the journal, he started to pay attention to the bottom right corner of every page which is where he found personal notes left by the nurses regarding their feelings of tyrogue's condition. In the front of the book, the tone was optimistic and professional, their scribblings quickly turned into curious musing as they uncovered more about tyrogue's illness. Doubt found its way into their notes as their attempts to heal tyrogue's lungs with their chansey's help proved useless. Dates at the top of each page told Wallace just over a year had passed when the nurse's notes became spiteful and frustrated as it seemed to become clear to the nurses their efforts were going to continue to hit walls.

Wallace noted a change in the final three pages of the journal, the writing was different, less rushed and messy. A header explained tyrogue's owner had given up on waiting for their pokémon to heal and had essentially orphaned the fighting-type. As a ward of the region, Kanto reached out to Kalos to pick up tyrogue's treatment and travel arrangements were made. The final page was a summary of the entire book's findings and word of encouragement to the next medical team assigned to tyrogue.

"There's nothing in here that says what is wrong with tyrogue," Wallace said, shutting the book. "It just mentions a problem with the lungs, an infection, and that's it. They mention something called pulmonary edema, but it was crossed out almost every time I saw the words."

"They misdiagnosed him," Cheryl said. "Tyrogue's disease came from a battle, I believe during a fight with a ground or rock type tyrogue inhaled silica dust." Cheryl rubbed her fingers together in front of her face as she spoke and moved back to the x-ray scans. "It's a naturally occurring oxide found in the wild and is found in sand all over the world. I've never been given the exact story, but just off the notes and tyrogue's condition I'm guessing he was caught up in a nasty sandstorm and he inhaled crystalline pieces of silica dust that found their way into his lungs."

"Every trainer sends their pokémon to a center to be healed from stuff like that, so what makes tyrogue's case so bad?" Cole asked, shrugging.

"The treatments that centers, no matter where you are in the world, can handle are usually less severe," Cheryl said. "A burn, a toxin in the bloodstream, bruises, fatigue, and maybe if tyrogue had been taken to a center immediately they would have noticed the dust. But if tyrogue wasn't externally showing signs of weakness following his encounter with the dust, his trainer probably did nothing and it allowed the dust to scar tyrogue's lungs."

"What do we do first?" Wallace asked, the recordings of the Kanto nurse's notes feeling much heavier in his hands. He looked to Cole who was scribbling something down into a notebook.

"I think we're done for today," Cheryl said, sparring a glance at tyrogue. "Jimmy and I have done much to help tyrogue's condition and before I let to two inexperienced kids near him you need to do your homework. All those books I laid out in the other room are for your perusal. They contain _my_ notes about tyrogue as well as detailed information about his species, studies about silicosis, the specific lung disease we're working with, as well as procedures you'll need to become familiar with in order to be of use to me."

With a wave of her hands, Cheryl ushered the boys back into the adjoining room. "I have only one copy of each book so you'll have to share. I know this class only meets twice a week, but you'll be expected to visit the clinic every day for any updates on tyrogue. You need all of this reading done before Tuesday, that's when I scheduled an operation to clear a bacterial infection from tyrogue's lungs. I'll see you two tomorrow, stop by the front desk for your name badges and uniforms before you leave."

Cheryl gave the two of them a short wave before she moved into the sick room and flicked off the lamp spotlighting tyrogue and left.

Elgyem's yellow lights lit up the dim room and Wallace nodded his unease to his pokémon. "This is a lot," he said, looking for all the books they had to read in five days. "How should we do this, if we have to share?"

Cole ripped a page out of the notebook and handed it to Wallace. "I've got some stuff to take care of, but we can meet up later and go over all this together. Here's my room number and my phone number, text me yours and I'll let you know when we can get together." Cole stuffed the notebook under his arm, put his pencil in his mouth and whipped his phone out to start texting. "Bring the books when you come by, see you later," he said, leaving Wallace alone in the lab.

* * *

Hours later Wallace sat at the fountains, halfway through the second book in Cheryl's research notes on tyrogue's disease. The first tomes he delved into turned out to be both engrossing and a little worrisome. Cheryl's dedication to detailing every aspect of tyrogue's time in the clinic. The notes cataloged the atrophy of tyrogue's muscles, the deterioration of his lungs, and the causes of the bacterial infection that prevented her from making any progress. But as his admiration for Cheryl's work grew, so did his fear that tyrogue was beyond saving.

Coming to the end of a chapter, Wallace closed the book and laid back on the stone block at the edge of the fountain. He laid there for what felt like hours, listening to the bubbly sound of the fountains as he tried to collocate the last three days.

His first week back had played out about as well as he expected. Every new class he entered he was greeted by the wary look of a professor and the disapproving glances of his classmates. He opted to work alone on any group projects that weren't mandatory and settled for working with the quietest person in class when he had to. He caught up with Carl every day as they waited for Mrs. Smith to visit the beach and he visited Eleanor every night in the ICO lobby and together they completed one of her coloring books, but he made sure to vacate the premises whenever Julian, Reed, and their candlelight cult services started. Every night following his classes he took his nightly dip in the bay and chatted with Alexia who was still shaken by their encounter by the anonymous figure sulking around Myrrh Hall.

The last thought pulled Wallace out of his thoughts and pulled him up, physically. He sighed as he hunched over and pressed his fingers into his eyelids, punching globs of colors into his vision. So many questions burned at the back of his mind regarding the Orphans and their lack of a presence around campus, the mysterious person in Myrrh Hall, and Reed's candlelight meetings with the NRR. And to top it off, the life of a small ill pokémon rested on his shoulders.

Wallace ran a hand over his face and shut the book, setting it aside with the others on the block to observe the activity of the quad in front of him. With the sun unobstructed and gleaming freely down on the quad, the center of campus was abuzz with students and their pokémon. Six stone blocks sat around each fountain and every one of them was occupied by another student, some studying, some sunbathing, and others playing card games.

Small feet splashed through the pooled water of the fountain behind Wallace as water and grass-types frolicked in the spray. A small blue pokémon with stick-like legs darted out of the water and onto the paved stone, looking scared as its body turned in each direction, its small beady eyes scanning its surroundings for potential threats.

Something soft whipped the back of Wallace's ankles before his litleo lunged from under him and tackled the smaller pokémon, pinning it to the ground.

"Skit! Skit! Skit!"

Wallace tipped his head as Mila kept the crying surskit pinned to the ground with one paw as her tail flicked like a whip. "Mila," he said.

The litleo's back seized, her head lowering as she looked over her shoulder, her ears twitching as her paw inched back from surskit. The moment it was free, the surskit's leg flailed to get under it and it scurried away, darting back through the fountain.

Litleo skulked back under Wallace's legs and no sooner than the surskit disappeared did Wallace hear its chirping cry again. Whipping around he saw the surskit slide across the surface of the fountain water, out of the path of two girls who skated through the middle of the fountain. From their long legs, Wallace's eyes tracked up to the faces of Azalea and Alina, grinning from under their helmets. When they passed him their wheels cut through the water and splashed water in his direction, spraying him in the process as they skated out of the water and down the path, giggling.

Wallace gasped, the chill of the water startling him. He panted, trying to peel his shirt off his skin as the echo of laughter reached him from down the path. In the direction the girls skated off, Wallace found a redheaded boy chuckling at his expense. Kolton stood against a lamppost, poorly covering his mouth as he laughed.

"I don't know why you take that stuff lying down."

Wiping water from his forehead and his eyes, Wallace turned to find Simone leering down on him. "It's not worth it," he said, shivering, despite the suns rays.

"Well, if they splash me they're going to find one of those blonde girls facedown in the water, so let's go somewhere else, I want to talk," she said. "We can go to your room, someplace where we can talk about the O-R-P-H-A-N-S."

Another thought boiled into Wallace's mind, after leaving the clinic he stopped by his room to pick up Mila and drop elgyem off. As he left Nicki was pulling Willow onto their bed with an arsenal of nail polishes in hand. "How about we go to the café? I'm hungry," he said.

* * *

Seated in a chocolate colored booth in the Azure Bay Café, Wallace watched Simone take his order of fries and a side of meat pellets for Mila to the register. As his litleo rubbed against his legs, purring fervently, Wallace slipped off one of his shoes and nudged the feline pokémon until he felt her plop down and roll over to accept a belly rub.

Despite a public café seeming like a less than ideal place to have a private conversation, Wallace was pleased to find the café mostly empty. A few upperclassmen where sitting at the coffee bar, engulfed in the playback footage of an overseas tournament and the only other people in sight were staff and student workers either wiping tables or chatting by the door to the back patio.

Waiting on Simone, Wallace shot Cole a text about his location before he cracked open one of the books shipped from Kanto and flipped to the back right away. It didn't take long to find some of the more desperate notes left by the Kantonian nurses and as he re-read there worry and desperation, he hoped he and Cole wouldn't end up in the same boat.

In the margins, Wallace found light scribbles of possible long-term issues tyrogue might have, the word psychological underlined several times. He wished the book had been organized better, though he couldn't imagine he could have made anything more cohesive given a book of blank pages and nothing but failed treatments to fill it with.

A tray slamming onto his table interrupted Wallace's reading. A girl wearing all black, jeans and a slick-looking polo tucked into her pants and secured with a belt stood over him, her hands gripped to the edge of the tray that held his and Mila's food. A bob of wavy pale pink hair brushed her shoulders as she angled her head down at him.

"I always thought we could take over the world," she said, by way of greeting as she eased into the booth across from him. "You, me, and him, some kind of unbeatable trinity."

Wallace's hand fumbled to shut the book as he took in the girl's appearance, or rather just her face, as it was the most striking part of her. Her face looked sunken in with dark pigmentation brushed along the hollows of her cheeks and glitter dusted along her cheekbones. Her cherry red lips smacked as she plucked a fry from Wallace's paper boat.

"I'm sorry?" Wallace said, his foot rubbing Mila in nervous strokes as the pink haired girl grabbed another fry.

The girl's eyes were focused on a blown up photo hung on the wall beside them, it was of the ICO, the dormitory that housed all first years. Based on the lack of foliage and fanfare in the picture Wallace guessed it had to be from before Arlette's death, as there seemed to be no sign of the Bellerose Courtyard in the photo.

"We have a lot in common, you and me," she said, her dark eyes finding Wallace again. "It's fate that brought us together here, you know that right?"

Wallace felt his brows furrowing and his mouth falling open ajar, without meaning for either to happen, as he tried to make sense of the strange girl. "What?"

"It's too bad you didn't bring Andrew back with you," she said, sticking the two pilfered fries between her lips and rubbing them back and forth, leaving behind small salt grains on her lips.

Wallace felt the bile rise in the back of his throat when the girl's tongue slipping out to lick at the salt deposits she left behind. "W-Who are you?" he asked, ashamed of the timidness he heard in his own voice. Something in her tone made him cold, not a chill up his spine, but an all encroaching freeze that killed all sensation and feeling in his body, except one, fear.

The sounds beyond the girl's voice fell to silence and the earthy colors of the café seemed to come alive in swirling and vibrating tones. The girl's pastel hair looked like some kind of abstract flame caressing her scalp as her lips spread from ear to ear.

The girl snorted as she dropped the fries onto the table. She plucked a pale brown napkin from its holder on the table and opened it up before she laid the fries inside and started a complicated method of wrapping them up. "Are you scared of me?" she asked, her smile widening. "I'm not deadly, not really."

Once the fries were wrapped up and nearly breaking out of the single ply napkin the girl stood and brushed off her shirt. Her hands passing over the top of the polo drew Wallace's eyes to a stitched section of the top: **Radix Dining.**

"You work here?" Wallace asked, his head snapping around the café, suddenly wishing it was full of people and wondering where Simone managed to vanish off to. "What do you want?"

"Silly," she said, her hands trailing the edge of the table as she rounded to Wallace's side and blocked his only means of escape. Slowly, the girl leaned forward into his booth until their faces were close enough that Wallace could count the freckles along her chin. "I just wanted to meet you."

With that, she snapped straight up and wiggled her fingers at his boat of fries. "Enjoy! Condiments are located on the west side of the café, I'll be at the bar if you need anything else."

In the wake of the girl's interference into his reading, Wallace sat frozen to his booth seat. Moments bled into one another as the boys at the bar threw their arms up to cheer and high five each other at the same time while eating their food. Simone appeared at the edge of his vision, but he couldn't tell if she was across the room or standing beside him. One sensation returned at a time, muted colors of café returned from their hyper state.

He started to stroke Mila's fur again, the dual-type lying peacefully at his feet, probably asleep considering she didn't make a sound when the girl sat in the booth, or maybe she had and he missed it. Something about her triggered an old feeling in his chest that made his heart rate and cold dread drip into his gut. The closest he could compare it to was Chara. The feeling of uncertain doom he felt in the mansion when he saw Dirk's lifeless body and Simone and Ben lying unconscious at the feet of a knife-wielding Chara, she brought those feelings back to the forefront.

Once depth perception returned, Wallace watched Simone slide into her seat with a large tray overflowing with food.

"Sorry that took so long, they messed up my order so I _convinced_ them to give me the mess-up and what I ordered. All for free," she said, proudly, as she popped a berry from a plate of green into her mouth. "What's wrong?"

"Did you see her?" he asked, his voice low and grating as he reached for his hair and ruffled it. "The pink haired girl! She was just here talking to me about being a trinity and being upset I didn't bring Andrew to campus with me. She just walked away, she was wearing one of their shirts."

Simone's brows cocked up and her upper lip followed suit as she turned in her booth and scanned the café. The scene hadn't changed much, the boys at the bar had their heads down stuffing their faces and the employees who had been working were parked in another booth, still talking.

"Uh, I'm not seeing anyone like that," Simone said. "And unless she was the old white man that took my order in disguise, I don't think she's here anymore."

"I think she was an Orphan," Wallace said, the cold dread in his stomach melting away by a nervous heat that haloed his scalp.

Simone's eyes went wide and she pushed her tray aside to lean over the table. "Serious? That's what I wanted to talk about! I haven't seen hide or nor hair from any of them, even Willow. I was going to suggest a visit to the safari, maybe rile them up."

Wallace swallowed hard and shook his head. "I was just there with the freshman class, nothing weird happened."

"Of course not," she said, scowling. "If they've got serpents like Willow on their team they know when the University is sending a bunch of people to their hideout, so of course they lay low. We've got to go when they won't be expecting company."

"So what's your plan?" he asked as his phone buzzed in his lap. He tapped the device to life and found a message from Cole waiting for him. "Actually, I've got to go," he said, looking past Simone to the entrance of the café where Cole had his body pressed to the glass.

"But we just got here," Simone said, sounding a little hurt.

"I know! Sorry, I've just – homework – and yeah – things. I'm sorry, call me!" he said, frantic as he grabbed the nurse's journals, his and Mila's food and whistled for Mila to follow. He looked over his shoulder to see Simone frowning as his startled litleo scampered out from under the table.

"Candy?" Cole asked, still leaning against the glass with his hand outstretched, a small yellow pellet resting on his palm.

Wallace shook his head in a weird accepting, but unsure away, and grabbed the pellet and flicked it into his mouth. His cheeks seized up the moment it touched his tongue and out of reflex he spat it into his hand. "It takes like a battery!"

"It's for pokémon, not people," Cole said, sighing as he rolled off the glass and out into the lobby.

Wallace looked over the pellet, slightly damp, and rolled it between his fingers as he walked after Cole. He clicked his tongue a few times to get Mila's attention and once her eyes locked onto the pellet, there wasn't a need for him to give her the cue. Litleo leaped for the pellet, chomping on Wallace's fingers in the process and loudly crunched the candy as she trotted across the lobby.

"Is your room fine to study in?" Cole asked as they left the Student Union and followed the paved path straight for their dorm.

Wallace hummed back, hoping Nicki and Willow had finished whatever bonding day they planned on having as neither had a class to attend on Thursdays. When they reached his room; however, he wasn't entirely surprised to find Willow on Nicki's bed with her feet dipped into Wink's pool, his water-type snoozing under the girl's legs and Nicki in the process of braiding together a crown of flowers. At Willow's side sat elgyem, a bottle of nail polish and a nail file floating in orbit around him.

"The hell?" Cole asked, peering past Wallace into the room.

Wallace shook his head and shut the door, backing into Cole in the process. "Is your room fine?" he asked, his face burning at what his living space had turned into.

Without a word, Cole led Wallace to the far end of the hall and into a room at least three times as big as his. Most of the room was open space, but against a far wall sat two bed frames, side by side to create the illusion of one large bed that held two mattresses.

Aside from that two desks had been pushed together beside two large closets, similar to the ones in his room. But on the other side of the room, he found two more closets and desks pushed into the corner along with a pile of finished wood.

"This is a quad?" Wallace asked. "Where are your roommates?"

"I lived with the same guys last year, but they all made other plans this year," Cole said, sighing a little. "It gets a little lonely, but my team makes it better." Cole moved away from Wallace's side to the right wall and ran his hand down the shining dark blue fur of a large pokémon lying across another bed. "Luxray keeps guard while I'm gone. Right, Shia?"

The luxray growled and nipped at Cole's hand as it passed over her backside, but eventually kind of rolled to the side and let Cole rub its stomach before swatting him away.

"So we've got Professor Till's TM assignment and all this nursing shit," Cole said, running his hands over his face and groaning as he dragged himself, discarding his shoes in the process, to one of the closets. "What's first?"

Wallace looked around the room, feeling out of place and unsure of what to do. Half of the room was empty aside from the bed that luxray occupied and the other half Cole had taken practically two of everything leftover to make into his own lair. While looking for a place to put down either the food or the books, Wallace spotted the small of Cole's back as he started to pull a sweatshirt off overhead.

Realizing Cole was about to change he started looking for something to keep his eyes occupied – he hadn't grabbed any napkins from the café, the fries were surely greasy. After a few more moments of Wallace counting just how much pellets were in Mila's bowl, he heard the sound of material shifting stop followed by the sound of bed springs. Looking back to the room he found Cole sitting cross-legged on his bed in a tank top and basketball shorts. "Make yourself at home," he said, gesturing to the floor.

Wallace sat Mila's food down by the door as she seemed interested in admiring Cole's luxray from a safe distance and crossed the floor, walking in the stretched sunlight rectangle on his floor. Wallace eased down into a sitting position and left his fries and the books fall from his arms. "I forgot to grab the prototype, so I guess we can just read," he said.

"Where do we start?" Cole asked, leaning over the edge of his bed, looking for the line of books.

Wallace tapped the hard red cover of the first book he opened. "It has more information about what the nurses in Kanto did," he said, handing it up.

Cole dropped the book onto his lap and flipped it open to the middle only to flick the pages back to the beginning.

Wallace grabbed the book he hadn't finished and his boat of fries, holding it aloft to Cole. "Want one?"

Cole's skeptical eyes lifted from the book at the fries before he reached out and smugly grabbed one. "Thanks."

* * *

End of Chapter Forty One

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #40:** Will Wallace succeed in helping cure tyrogue?


	42. Nat

**Disclaimer:** _Pokémon_ and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.

* * *

 **A Yearning for the Mud  
** **Chapter Forty Two – Nat**

 _Do I dare disturb the universe? - T.S. Eliot_

* * *

The following day, as Sutcliffe's class emptied, Wallace waited, as had become his usual practice, for his classmates to leave. Rushing to his next class to avoid being late was worth avoiding confrontation with his fellow students. By the end of his first week, Wallace had taken in an abundance of hints that he wasn't welcome at Radix, and any attempt at fitting in, even trying to walk through a classroom door as another student earned him glares and resulted in him being shoved into the nearest wall.

He took his time making sure everything he came to class with was with him as his classmates descended the aisles. "Time to go," he said, holding his hand out to elgyem at the front of his desk, a small pencil moving through the air. Elgyem sat on the edge of a notebook, his legs on the pages as he maneuvered the pencil across the page, drawing tally marks and circles in increasing size.

"You're getting good buddy," Wallace said, impressed at elgyem's diligence in practicing every day at making straight lines and circles.

As some stragglers passed through the doors Wallace scanned the room. Professor Sutcliffe and Tempest were the only ones in sight. As Wallace watched Tempest scoop up a floette off her desk and into her arms, a cold chill crept across his shoulders at the thought that two days of class had gone by and he hadn't heard from Ben. On top of that he hadn't seen Ben in class since Monday either.

To the left side of the room Sutcliffe's poster boards with every one of their names on them caught Wallace's eye. Eleanor and Alexia were the first two students with boards on the wall and the rest followed in alphabetical order, but as his eyes glanced over the names, he noticed three missing spots on the wall. The first gap he noticed was at the end of the first row, the first space in the second row was vacant, and the final one in the fifth row.

"Tempest," he said, sliding out of his desk and between desks to reach the wall of poster boards. "You got paired with Kit right?" he asked, his eyes drifting over each poster on the wall again.

"Who's Kit?" Tempest asked, fiddling with a button on her flannel to the sound of Sutcliffe erasing the chalkboards.

"It seems the two of you are partnerless, right?" Sutcliffe asked, clapping his hands together, creating a small chalk dust cloud. "The other groups have all gotten a head start, but if you put your heads down and power through you should be fine."

"N-No," Wallace stammered out, finding it hard to get a word in as the professor addressed them with his cold eyes for a fraction of a second and started cleaning his desk. "Ben's my partner, Tempest is with Kit, I just didn't see them in class today."

Giving the poster boards look Wallace crossed off names in his mind until he was sure the first gap had been Ben's poster and the second had to have been Kit's, labeled with his real name, Christopher. But the last poster stumped him.

"I'll text you later then," Tempest said, shrugging her shoulders. "We can go over what we've done for our projects and decide which one we want to use."

Wallace blew air through his lips, feeling frustrated at Sutcliffe and Tempest for ignoring him. He watched Sutcliffe and Tempest gather their things and leave through separate doors as elgyem carried his bag to him.

As Wallace and elgyem left through the main stairwell, Wallace gave calling Ben a try. An obnoxious dial sound came through the phone followed by a computerized voice. _"I'm sorry, the number you've reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Pleas_ _e_ _check the number and try your call again."_

Wallace followed the stone path that hugged his dormitory, running explanations over in his mind, reasons that Ben would have become a ghost in the course of a week. It was possible he left, transferred schools or dropped out, but he'd seen Simone every day, for Orphan elimination strategy sessions as she called them, and she hadn't mentioned Ben at all. None of their shared professors had anything to say either.

He reached the library and saw a small crowd of students gathered in the grass, their attention turned toward a group of four in the middle of one of the yards sectioned off by walking paths. Through gaps in the gathered bodies, Wallace saw two girls making laps in the yard. He caught glimpses of the girls' faces, Alina and Azalea, running with a snivy who sat on the back of a sprinting luxio.

The girls moved in perfect synchronicity, their arms hinging at the same time and their feet pounding the grass in time. At their side, the luxio's body seemed to phase in and out of focus as afterimages of it and snviy appeared in the yard, putting them in the middle of a herd of charging electric-types.

A megaphone cracked to life and drew the crowd's attention to a boy who stood on one of the side paths. "Introducing Alice and Alex the metagross, you can see them both this weekend at our coordinator celebration, hosted by the Civet family," he shouted through the device.

A large spinning metallic body cut across the yard, a girl sitting on top, her features a blur as the metagross continued to spin.

"Alex, go for a psychic!"

The metagross froze on a dime, the girl on its head unfazed by the sudden stop as her pokémon's eyes glowed. In quick flashes, purple light coated each of luxio's afterimages, their bodies leaving trails of purple light in their wake as they lapped the field again.

Wallace stepped back from the crowd as the snivy started to gather light for an attack in front of its chest and green flecks light added to the swirling purple mass. The boy on the megaphone made his way through the crowd, waving flyers through the air.

Needing to get the clinic, Wallace pulled elgyem off his shoulder to his chest and headed off, hoping everyone would be too busy enjoying the show to notice him, though it seemed he was a hard one to ignore anymore. As he moved past the crowd, the crack of the megaphone seemed to explode into his ear and startle him off from his destination.

"I hope you weren't planning on coming this weekend," the boy said, speaking through the amplifier.

Wallace glanced to the side to find Kolton holding a handful of flyers to his hip, his narrowed eyes visible of the brim of the megaphone. "I wasn't," he said, sighing as he didn't recognize Kolton's voice behind the megaphone or else he would have left sooner.

"Good," Kolton said, dropping the megaphone. "The only thing funnier than you as a person is you trying to maintain a normal student life despite being so disliked. Actually, that last part is admirable. Possibly even redeemable, if you weren't a terrible person." Kolton laughed as he brought the megaphone back up and starting screaming out adverts for the event, leaving Wallace to wallow.

He watched Kolton dive back into the crowd, pressing flyers into people's hands before he left, cutting through the grass around the library to the reach the clinic without further altercation.

Compared to the crowd outside, the clinic lobby was a graveyard, the only people around were the staff behind the main desk and custodian changing trash cans with the help of a trubbish that seemed all too happy to eat any garbage that fell near the can.

Wallace checked in at the desk and took his student-worker badge and headed back. He let elgyem lead the way through the newer halls of the clinic until he reached his and Cole's assigned room. Wallace knocked on the door of the guest room attached to tyrogue's sick room, interrupting Cheryl who looked busy writing on a clipboard. Cole's head dangled over the edge of the bed, his mouth ajar, as he laid across the mattress.

"Day two," Cheryl said, tapping the lead of her pencil onto the board as she looked between the boys, shaking strands of her dark bob back. "Glad you both managed to follow my instructions of reporting in."

"So what's up, doc?" Cole asked, rolling to an upright position.

Cheryl's dark eyes narrowed in on Cole and rolled in their sockets as she looked back to her clipboard. "Tyrogue is doing fine and we're still on track for surgery. Four days to go, keep reading, I need you as knowledgable as possible before then. Be sure to pay close attention to the book I gave you that details the procedure, you need to know what to expect. I don't want any surprises."

"Okay," Wallace said, glancing to Cole who'd offered to store the books in his room.

"I've got some things to check on, feel free to stay as long as you like," Cheryl said. "I'll see you both tomorrow."

* * *

Leaving the clinic, Wallace followed crossing paths toward the center of campus and crept along behind the Performance Maison and the back of the auditorium until he found a pair of glass doors, marked by the words Linden Natatorium.

Pulling on the doors, the smell of chlorine and the sounds of water splashing and wet feet slapping tile all hit Wallace. Wallace followed shallow lines, like veins crawling across the walls of an echoey room with half painted and half tiled walls. His classmates darted across the blue and white tiled floor and in and out from open doorways to the left of the room.

"Can't you make an exception? For me?"

To his right Wallace found Alexia, bobbing up and down in front of Professor Summers with a sparkling milotic tail draped across her arms.

Professor Summers sighed and started to twist a strand of her confection brown curls around her finger as her eyes studied the high ceiling in the pool room. "Miss Violette, it's not really policy, for safety reasons. What if the tail gets caught in a drain or a filter?"

"I promise I'll be careful, I'm a pro at swimming with my milotic tail," Alexia pleaded, bouncing from side to side, vibrant waves of her air swishing across her back. "Pleaseeeee!"

"I guess it wouldn't hurt anything," Professor Summers said, tugging on a curl until it laid straight against her neck.

"Thank you!" Alexia cheered as she blew a kiss toward the professor and turned. "Oh, Wallace!" Upon locking eyes, Alexi wasted no time in skipping over to him, mindful of small puddles at her feet. "I didn't know you were taking this marine bio class too. Is your pokémon here already?"

Wallace nodded his head and glanced at Professor Summers. Prior to the first day of the class, each student had to send one water-type of their choice to the professor teaching the course in order to acclimate their pokémon to the chemicals in the water.

Despite Professor Summer's jovial manner, he could see how flustered she was when everyone else handed her poké balls and he dropped a wriggling Wink off into her arms last night.

"I'm gonna go get changed, you should too, let's hang together!" she said, pinching his arm. "It'll be like when we're in the bay, but smaller, and with more people!"

Wallace followed Alexia across the left side of the pool, glancing into the water where his classmates were swimming and lounging with their pokémon. Persia was there, wading into the water, and slipped a band onto her head and pushed her dark hair back as a round and soft-looking pokémon with a shell-like creature attached to its tail floated past her.

Alexia dipped off into the third open door they passed, Wallace walked through the next door and into a sloped room with all white tile and red lockers attached to the walls. A few boys sat along wooden benches in the middle of the room while others stood under shower faucets in their swim trunks.

"Elgy, can you find us a locker?" Wallace asked as he shrugged his bag off.

Elgyem flashed him a green light and floated off toward the nearest wall. Wallace moved to the end of a bench and fished into the bottom of his bag for a pair of red trunks with a white string across the front for synching.

Wallace moved over to the showers and half-walls and started to undressed. Everything he peeled off he pushed into his bag and slipped his trunks on as he pulled a lever that started the shower. Not designed to have the same pressure as a normal shower, Wallace let the weak water flow fall over him and rinsed out his hair until elgyem came flying over and through the water spray. "Got one?" he asked.

"Gy!" Elgyem cried, but rather than point toward a locker, he jabbed his hand over to another shower stall.

Warily, Wallace looked over to find Cosmo standing under the shower beside him, eyes closed as the water pounded his face. Cosmo held his glasses to his chest as the water pressed his silver-blond hair to his scalp. "Cosmo," he said, low, but harsher than a whisper.

One of Cosmo's blue eyes popped open and the boy jerked to the side, looking startled.

"Hi," Wallace said, waving, which as he did it felt like a stupid gesture.

"I can't be seen talking to you," he said quickly. "Despite how fun it sounds, Nat promised he would punt me into space if he caught wind of me talking to you."

Wallace nodded, biting his lower lip, not surprised that Nat had made his feelings clear to his siblings. "Well, what – "

"I can't talk to you about Don," Cosmo said, pushing hair from his face as he pulled on his shower lever and the water pressure slowed to a drip.

"Okay," Wallace said, swallowing hard at Cosmo's cool dismissal. "I'm doing a project for Professor Sutcliffe, about extraterrestrial pokémon."

"You've got one on your shoulder, what do you need me for?" Cosmo asked, his eyes focusing in on elgyem who controlled the water coming from the shower head to avoid him.

"Elgy is just one example, there are others," Wallace said, coyly, waiting for Cosmo to take the bait. "You know more about them than anyone else I know." Wallace watched as Cosmo's chest expanded with air and then deflated.

"I'll be in touch," Cosmo said swiping water off his glasses before he slipped them off and moved out of the shower.

Wallace watched Cosmo head off, a pair of silver swim trunks with golden moons swishing under the locker room lights. At the boy's feet, a deep violet starmie hopped along after him.

Counting it as progress and a small victory, Wallace turned his shower off and grabbed his bag from outside the stall. Elgyem led him to the far corner of the locker room where he tossed his bag in and left back into the pool room.

Scanning the shifting surface of the pool, Wallace searched for Alexia, or Persia, or someone else who might not hate him. As he and elgyem made their way around the north west corner of the pool a hand fell into the center of his back and with one good shove his feet slipped off the tile and he careened into the pool with a splash.

Out of sudden panic, Wallace churned in the water, unsure of which way he was facing until his head shattered the surface and cold air sliced his face. Hacking, Wallace threw his head back, mouth wide open, and inhaled a single gasp. He cleared water from his eyes and turned in the water to face the edge of the pool, a pair of feet moving across his vision.

He followed ankles up a pair of tone calves to a pair of black swim trunks that looked more like underwear. His eyes shot up past the boy's abs to find Calvin glaring down at him. A snap decision sent Wallace's arm cutting across the water and sent a spray of water at Calvin's legs. Calvin jolted back from the water and the instant their eyes met, Wallace regretted it.

"You serious?" Calvin asked, stepping up to the edge of the pool. "Crawdaunt!"

Wallace's eyes scanned the edge of the pool, but saw nothing, not even elgyem who must have gone flying. A monstrous growl and the slush of water turned Wallace to face a daunting shell covered pokémon charging for him across the pool.

Wallace filled his lungs with air and dove. As the crawdaunt moved through the pool above, the water pulled him and flung him against the side of the pool. He felt the impact as an explosion against his shoulder blades that sizzled down to his fingertips.

Through the water's frothy undertow, Wallace saw something blue standing out against the water. A ridge of red spikes assured Wallace of what he was seeing, Wink diving from halfway across the pool.

Before he could do anything, he felt the water's suck and pull and looked up to meet crawdaunt's round eyes. Its clawed arm swung up and down through the water... at him. Wallace spiraled, trying to turn in the water, but found himself facing crawdaunt full on as the arm came down.

The water slowed the swing, allowed him to see it come in slow motion and gave him the hope he could avoid it. But slow as the arm moved, it had momentum and Wallace moved even slower. The claw crushed him, the white underside slamming onto his chest with the impact of a bus.

The impact stunned him, disrupting his electrical impulses, as the brunt of the blow weighed down on him and he was pushed further down into the pool. Air bubbles boiled from his lips and clouded his vision until the orange shell of the crawdaunt was out of sight.

Above him the surface of the pool broke, a starmie, an azumarill, and a quagsire all landed in the water and rushed toward crawdaunt. Wallace watched the water churn and alter shape, sometimes into jet streams of bubbles and other times into waves that moved against the current, all focused on crawdaunt.

Another impact against Wallace's back reignited the pain in his chest as he hit the bottom of the pool. In passing seconds he flirted with unconsciousness as he watched the water become frothy and white as a battle raged above him.

Something red broke the surface, yards away from the fight, and glittering scales like sheets of the rainbow propelled a girl down to him. Behind her Wink's tail propelled him to the bottom of the pool. The pool grew dark at the bottom and the darkness crept into Wallace's vision before the mermaid could reach him.

* * *

Awake wasn't the right word, but Wallace knew he wasn't fully asleep either. Cognizant was the better choice. The passage of time had become lost on him as he made conscious efforts not to open his eyes. Instead, he took in the surroundings in the brief moments of his cognizance.

It was dark inside his eyelids, but a different kind of darkness he'd last known. The pool's water, cold and still, was an unfamiliar darkness. Wherever he was now, it was, without a doubt, someplace new, but familiar. It wasn't as dark, the inside of his eyelids were a rusty brown and the material touching his legs and arms was scratchy, but not unpleasant. Still, like the pool, it was just as cold and quiet.

Aligning the fractured memories he could manage to fit together, Wallace recalled moments of feeling cold and water-logged, followed by warmth and comfort, like a blanket had been laid over him and times when soft voices surrounded him like a family holding conversation over a dinner table. He was sure the conversations were directed toward him, though no one spoke directly to him or requested anything of him.

As the conversations went on he kept his eyes squeezed shut and let the darkness reclaim him, but try as hard as he could the darkness seemed further away this time. Wallace settled and slowed his breathing, hoping to slip away again, back into the realm where consciousness was a myth. But the ringing of a phone launched him from his sleep. His eyes opened in a gruelingly slow process that involved acclimating to the sun glaring at him through his windows. Wallace cleared his throat as he felt around for his phone, the ringing growing louder as he found it partially under his bed.

He hung there for a moment, draped over his bed like a sheet as he gave himself a moment to wake up prior to attempting to hold a conversation with someone. "Hello?" he said as he answered the phone and turned on the speaker, leaving the device on the floor.

Silence came through the line, not even the sound of shuffling or hands fumbling against the phone.

Wallace sighed as he switched off the speaker and pulled the phone to his ear. "Hello? Who – " He instantly recoiled back as the phone started ringing again into his ear. Alarmed, he glared at the phone, which showed it was thirteen seconds into the call, yet ringing for an unknown reason.

He thumbed every button on the touchscreen, but nothing changed. The timer continued to count away the seconds of the call while the phone's standard ringtone played every few seconds. He was about to force the device to power off when he heard his door slam.

The impact startled him into dropping the phone. Had Nicki woken up from the ringing and left in a hurry? Sliding out of bed, Wallace padded across the room, finding Nicki's and WIllow's beds empty as he opened the door.

The hall was vacant and as he stepped out of his room he found the doors adjacent to his open. With each barefoot step he made down the length of the hall he strained to see the rest of the rooms, as each seemed to have had their doors left open, aside from the bathroom.

Turning back, where he knew he'd find his own door open, Wallace gawked at the wall of white brick. His door had vanished. He jogged back down the hall and groped the wall, feeling every ridge and bump in the brick, his sluggish mind unable to understand what he was seeing.

"Am I asleep?" he asked, about to pinch his leg when someone bellowed out a yell from down the hall.

The sound made his skin rise into bumps as the outcry seemed to last forever, or at least longer than what seemed humanly possible. It became more like an alarm, blaring in his ears and never dying in its volume or intensity.

He tiptoed down the hall, unable to pinpoint where the yelling had come from but turned toward the first room he came too. Inside he found a face he'd never be able to forget. Dirk Underwood, identifiable by his mohawk and the pained looked on his face as he laid back on the floor, the same way Wallace had found him on the staircase in the mansion, only this time, Dirk was alive.

Dirk's limbs kicked, slamming against the floor as his face stretched in pain. The dark planes of Dirk's face were etched by the shadows in the room as a pair of hands clamped around his neck.

Whatever lingering warmth Wallace retained from being in bed faded as he watched Chara straddle Dirk's waist, the muscles in his exposed arms bulging as he applied fatal force to crushing Dirk's throat. Dirk's mouth gaped wide as Chara started to shake him, slamming his head against the floor. As Wallace watched, DIrk's cry for help faded, muffled like he getting further away from the scene in front of him.

Wallace wanted to move, to enter the room and knock Chara off, but his feet felt cemented to the floor. His body swayed like a blade of grass, tilting, but never able to take a step forward. He stayed there, studying the scene in front of him.

He watched every moment of Dirk's death, every gasping breath he managed to get before Chara somehow made his grip even tighter. He felt every impact Chara made by smashing Dirk's head against the tile even when Dirk stopped fighting. He listened to Dirk's skull shattering against the floor, the impacts becoming less of a knocking sound as blood and brain matter cushioned the impact.

At some point, at the moment his vision was obscured by blinking, Wallace had turned. With his back to the room, Wallace faced the hall and to his surprise, Nat.

The oldest of the Freelily siblings stood there, plainly and without any explanation, half of his face obscured by bandages. Wallace's jaded expression twisted to horror as he watched Nat's face seem to shatter. Deep set lines like cracks formed around Nat's eye and in the corner of his mouth as he smiled. Dribbles of blood seeped from the corners of Nat's mouth and from his nose, running over his lips and painting his teeth pink as he flashed Wallace a grin. The whites of his bandages bled red and quickly soiled his wrappings.

"You shouldn't have come back," Nat said, flecks of blood flying from his lips as he spoke.

Wallace shuddered, the unsightly burns on Nat's face coming into focus. Patches of pink glossy skin covered more than half of Nat's face, giving him an almost plastic appearance. Wallace's lip quivered, his voice blocked, unable to say a word in his defense.

A sharp pain in his back sent alerts to Wallace's brain that Chara was still there, and more importantly, he'd just been stabbed. Craning his neck, he saw Chara behind him. The Orphan pulled back, the searing pain faded and instead, a pulsating gush filled his senses. Wallace felt himself growing weaker, his head light as he watched Chara twirled his knife between his fingers, dragging the blade across his tongue, Wallace's blood staining the pink Orphan's muscle.

"You shouldn't have come back," Chara said, catching the edge of the blade between his teeth.

Wallace wet his lips and gave talking another try, fighting past a scratchy feeling in his throat. "I wanted to help," he croaked. "I wanted to help."

His words echoed around him as he noticed the brick walls of the dorm had vanished, replaced by smooth white ones filled with paintings of his ancestors. His hand reached out and gripped the railing of the staircase in his townhouse.

In an automatic motion, Wallace pulled himself forward to the edge of a step and stared down the length of a staircase and found Andrew's broken and bent body at the bottom. He took slow and clumsy steps to the bottom, his eyes never straying from Andrew. There was no floor, only blood. Crimson tide pools covered every inch of the space below Wallace as he looked over Andrew and in the corner of his vision, Arlette. Their bodies were in similar states, limbs cocked into odd positions, their arms stretched out, their fingers just an inch from touching.

"Wallace... Why didn't... Why didn't you save me?" Arlette asked through rough breaths, the lower half of her face painted in blood.

"I tried," he whispered, teetering on the edge of the last step.

"You never try hard enough," Andrew said, his head cocked to an unnatural angle, his eyes struggling to focus on Wallace. "Why did you leave me?"

"I tried!" he snapped, his words causing the front doors of his townhouse to fling open.

Several figures entered through the doors, all wearing black cloaks that dragged the floor, their heads covered in hoods, though their faces were mostly visible. Chara led the procession inside, followed by Willow. Two figures who seemed to always be out of sight came in next, followed by the girl with thick waves of dark hair, Katherine.

Their presence seemed to absorb the sunlight as storm clouds filled the sky and blocked any sunlight from filling the room, turning the blood into a dark pool beneath him.

Their turned in unison toward him and with slow steps approached the staircase, hovering over him. Wallace backed away but found it impossible to climb to the top as the stairs were no longer there, replaced by one giant slope. Light tore through the clouds before a startling peal of thunder caused Wallace to recoil and shut himself off from the scene around him.

When he opened his eyes again he regretted it as a wave of light blew away the darkness of his eyelids. The sudden brightness stung, bringing moisture to his eyes, and with the first jolt of pain came every one of his senses, ringing like an alarm in his head.

The chill of the room raised his skin into bumps and lifting his head, or any part of her body, from its horizontal resting place, felt like an impossible task. Scanning the edge of his vision and kneading his fingers out, Wallace put together the pieces of his surroundings.

The clinic, he judged by the familiar and overwhelming smell of bleach that blanketed everything. Letting his eyes adjust with quick blinks, Wallace absorbed the sight of bare white walls and clean floors. There was just one window, the full force of the sunlight thankfully blocked by curtains, cabinets, a television, and a whiteboard all sat along the opposite wall. It looked slightly different than the patient rooms he remembered, but new expansions meant new rooms.

His mouth, dry and gummy, begged for water as he tried to clear his throat. Pressing his head into a stiff pillow, Wallace searched for any sign of relief nearby. Rolling his head to the left, where he hoped to find a tall glass of ice water, he found a lunch tray with a large white egg sitting on top, along with the water he desperately wanted.

Wallace grabbed the tall glass and found a pitcher of water waiting behind it. Without hesitation he tipped back a mouthful so fast he got brain freeze and gasped as the water soothed an ache down his chest and washed into his stomach. Despite the ache in his head, he took another gulp, and another until the glass was empty.

Shifting into a sitting position, Wallace pulled the lunch tray that sat fixed to a contraption behind the bed that let the tray swing over the bed. The egg was about a foot tall and, as he picked it up off the tray, surprisingly heavy. The outside was slick and smooth, without a shell, so Wallace sat it back onto the tray and pulled himself closer before he bit into it.

The white of the egg was tasteless but warm, but until he was several bites in he didn't get the full experience of what made chansey eggs so spectacular. Hot and buttery, the egg's yolk exploded across Wallace's tongue, complimenting the savorless notes of the whites. Letting the tray catch falling globs of yolk, Wallace gobbled down the egg, tearing off chunks of the whites and dipping them into the golden yolk until nothing was left but chunks of the egg.

Wallace sighed as he pushed the tray to the side and rubbed his stomach, feeling full and surprisingly energized, Wallace, moved the sheets aside, stretched his legs, and started scanning the rest of the room and the bedside tables. While in search of a remote, a knock came at his door before it opened and Alexia popped her head in, followed by Nurse Cheryl.

"You're awake, finally," Cheryl said, shutting the door behind them. "Your friend has been waiting in the lobby for hours since she brought you in." Like earlier in the day, Cheryl still held a clipboard to her chest, glancing at it every couple of seconds.

"You?" Wallace asked, surprised that anyone had bothered to wait for him to wake up, let alone take responsibility in getting him help.

"Well, actually, your elgyem brought you here," Alexia said, turning to the side and giving Wallace a glimpse of elgyem floating behind her with Wink hovering under him, covered in elgyem's psychic light.

Wallace laughed seeing Wink trying to squirm out of elgyem's control as he carried him to the bed. Wallace pulled his pokémon in his arms and sat back on his pillow, squeezing them both tight. "I'm glad you're both okay."

Alexia shrugged her shoulders and dropped a dark pack off her back. "I got your stuff together," she said, setting the bag on the floor.

Wallace recognized it as his book bag, though it looked wet, the fabric darkened and soaked. "What happened?"

Alexia's eyes softened as she tried to prod the bag and make it look less slumped. "After you left the teacher kind of lost control of the class and some of the guys threw your stuff into the pool. Persia helped me dry your clothes, but the stuff in your bag, couldn't really be saved..." Alexia said as she moved the bag from the floor to the row of cabinets. "I'll wait outside for you."

Cheryl watched as Alexia dipped out of the room before she moved to the foot of the bed. "You're free to go whenever you're ready," she said, only sparring him a quick glance. "There wasn't any fluid in your lungs, thankfully. Your friend said she performed CPR once they pulled you out of the water. There's no swelling from the impact, some slight bruising and you might feel some slight pain in the following days, but the chansey egg should have taken care of the worst of it."

"Thank you," he said with a wistful look at the lunch tray, wishing they'd given him two eggs instead of one. "Cheryl, how long was I asleep?"

Cheryl paused on her way to the door and checked her wrist watch. "About six hours," she said, frowning as if she hadn't realized the time. "Something Nurse Joie wanted me to follow-up on was your sleep schedule. She expected you to wake up shortly after you were signed in, but when you didn't she guessed you might have just been exhausted and enjoying the rest." Cheryl looked to her board again, lines in her forehead showing themselves. "How many hours of sleep do you usually get?"

"Uh, about eight," Wallace said, resting his finger in WInk's mouth and letting the totodile gnaw playfully on it.

"A night?" Cheryl asked, plucking a pencil out from the top of the clipboard.

Wallace watched Wink's jaw pop open and snap shut with little force on his finger and listened to the scribbling the nurse's pencil made against the paper. "A week."

Cheryl's head came up and she tapped her pencil's lead to the paper. "Eight hours a week?" she asked. "Wallace, the semester has just started. I know we've just come back from summer, but what's keeping you awake at night?"

Forcing himself to look at Cheryl, at her dark, smart, eyes that he often felt judging him, he felt the desire to unload and spill everything. Silence ran on interrupted between them as he fought against divulging every thought, worry, and fear that kept him from sleeping, but ultimately he shrugged her question off and pulled his finger from WInk's mouth.

"I can't help if I don't know," Cheryl said.

"Could you help?" he asked back.

Cheryl stuck her neck out and pressed her clipboard to her chest. "If I knew what the problem was, yes. Sleeping pills or meetings with the school therapist. We can rent you a pokémon from our sleep therapy team, a musharna, or something to help you fall asleep at a certain time."

Again, Wallace let silence fill the space following Cheryl's words, none of the options sounding appealing to him. When the uncomfortable state of the room stretched to the point that Wallace was afraid to move out of fear of making any noise, Cheryl started to move toward the door again.

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" she asked, one hand on the door knob.

"Did anyone else visit me while I was here?"

Without hesitation Cheryl shook her head, the ends of her dark bob dusting her shoulders. "Were you hoping someone else would?"

"No," he said, unsure of who exactly he thought might have come by. "I have another question."

Cheryl blinked, slowly, and let the door knob go, turning to face him fully.

"Do you know what room Nat Freelily is in?" Wallace asked.

"I'm not familiar with that patient," Cheryl said, checking her clipboard for assurance. "Check with the main desk, they could tell you. Any other questions?"

Wallace pursed his lips and shook his head, petting Wink as he waited for Cheryl to leave. After another moment of silence, the nurse left without another word. After he heard her footsteps recede down the hall Wallace slipped from the bed and tossed his clinic gown off and rummaged through his bag.

Like Alexia said, most of it was trashed. Papers and notebooks had been soaked through and the pages glued together as he looked everything over. He started to chuck everything that was still wet or had dried smudged, not caring about losing a week's worth of notes and thankful that he hadn't kept Cheryl's books on him.

He dressed and gathered elgyem and Wink as they set off through the clinic, not to find a nurse for help, but to find Nat's room. Wallace knew if he could navigate the newer parts of the clinic and find the old ICU he could find Nat's room again, hoping he hadn't be transferred.

Using just his surroundings as guides quickly proved fruitless as he found himself passing the same series of rooms with every turn he took. "Elgy, can you tell which way is the way out, or at least to the lobby?" he asked, deciding to take a left instead of another right.

Elgyem took off and glided down the halls ahead of him, zooming down an empty hall before he returned and flashed his red lights at Wallace. Wallace followed slowly behind, letting elgyem try different halls and quickly finding the right path for them until they passed through a set of double doors and stepped into a hall that looked a little more worn down than the others.

Everything was off-white, the tiles a little more faded and the walls slightly dingy, though still clean for a clinic. Wallace passed the familiar glass nurse's station and took a right down the hall to Nat's room. He paused just outside the door, his nerves getting the best of him as he hadn't come up with anything to say or a way to make his bond with Willow sound less toxic to the man she attacked.

He pressed himself to the wall adjacent to the door and gripped the knob, his mind turning up blank when it came to conversation starters. There didn't seem to be a joke, a greeting, or any connection of words that might break the ice to the eldest Freelily.

"Gy?"

Wallace glanced to the side to find elgyem floating in front of the room's window, arms cocked up in a shrug. "What?" he asked, moving to elgyem's side to find the inside of the room empty. Wallace's eyes tracked from the floor to the bed to the walls in disbelief as he opened the door. The room wasn't just empty, it was vacant, no trace of Nat or any patient remained in the room. It looked void of any personal effects to say someone was living there.

Wink snorted as he scooted his way inside, his snout pointing him in different directions before he backed into the wall trying to leave. The sound of a door clicking behind Wallace turned him around instantly, startling a nurse behind him.

"Excuse me," he said, his hand waving through the doorway of Nat's empty room. "Do you know what happened to the guy staying in this room? His name was Nat, he was being treated for burns."

The nurse, a small girl with tight blonde curls raised a wary brow at him as she gently shook her head. "I can't talk about patients like that with you," she said.

"I know, I know, but – do you know who I'm talking about?" Wallace asked, waving off her expected response. "He's been in there for almost a year, they wouldn't just move his room, would they? I know he wasn't well enough to leave."

"Are you related to him?" she asked.

His blood boiled and his nostrils flared as he inhaled, long and deep, taking in the signature scent of the clinic. Without wasting another word he veered right from the nurse and headed for the nurse's station. He heard Wink's claws on the tile as the water-type struggled to keep up and as he stopped at the glass station elgyem teleported to his side.

"Excuse me," he said, trying to quell his growing frustration. "There was something staying in a room down the hall, his name was Nat – umm, Nasturtium Freelily. I wanted to visit him, but he's not there anymore."

A dark skinned nurse curled her lips up and grabbed a large white binder to her left. "One sec," she said as he licked her fingers and started to flip through the pages inside, running her finger down each sheet until she'd gone through half the binder. "I'm don't see that name in my records."

"Well, look again," Wallace said, fighting the urge to yell. "He was here, his record has to be there, he was a burn victim, he practically lived here!"

"Sir," she said, though she couldn't have been much older than him. "You don't need to raise your voice. When I tell you his name isn't in my record, it's not there. Do you need to speak to my supervisor?"

Wallace backed away from the glass and sighed as he scratched the top of his head and turned in the hall. Nurses around him were shooting glances his way, but someone dragging a broom across the floor caught his eye. "Johnny!"

Wallace rushed down the opposite hall toward his classmate who paused at sweeping a line of dirt into a dustpan. "Johnny, please, help me."

Johnny shook his head and waggled the broom at him. "No way, if you made a mess, you clean it up," he said.

"Do you remember Nat? Wallace asked, finding it hard to catch his breath. "He was burned in the stadium the night you saved me? Have you seen him around? His room is empty, the nurses don't know what I'm talking about, they're starting to piss me off." He was sure some of the passing nurses heard him, but he didn't care.

Johnny's eyes widened with a slow shake of his head. "I understood almost none of what you just said."

Wallace hung his head and sucked in a deep throat through his mouth, trying to force himself to calm down. He fanned himself for a second, the florescent lights feeling all too bright and the halls too stuffy. "His name is Nat, you know who I'm talking about."

Johnny puffed up his cheeks before letting it blow through his lips, again in the midst of shaking his head. "Not ringing a bell to me," he said. "I don't really talk to the patient, I just clean up their dust."

Wallace focused on each of Johnny's eyes, hoping to find a glimmer of a hint that he was joking and the punchline was on the horizon. "How can it not ring a bell?" he asked, his voice breaking. "He was burned because of me, because of you, you felt terrible." Wallace threw his hands out to the broom and dustpan Johnny held. "You took this job because of that! How can you say that it doesn't ring a bell?"

Johnny's shoulders fell as he seemed to study Wallace's face with the same regard Wallace had just done. "Wallace, I'm sorry, I really am, I want to help you, but I – I don't know who Nat is."

"I heard you're looking for someone?"

Wallace clenched his jaw as he turned to find Nurse Joie behind him, her signature pink hairstyle a welcome sight.

"Oh, Wallace it's you," she said, her face lighting up before her eyes fell to the floor. "Is that your totodile?" she gasped. "He's so big, bigger than I expected he'd be at this point. I'm so glad to see you're taking good care of him, I was disappointed we couldn't continue our check-ins last year."

Wallace slipped his tongue between his molars and bit down as Nurse Joie rambled on about Wink's progress. None of that mattered to him at the moment. "Nat Freelily," he said, plainly, the side of his tongue going numb from pain.

"Who?" she asked.

Every muscle in his body clenched at the nurse's quick response. "He was a patient here. He was brought in the night I was here with my totodile. The same exact night. He was staying in the room at the left end of the other hallway."

Unlike the others, Nurse Joie seemed to absorb was Wallace was saying. She bobbed her head and stepped back to the nurses' station and disappeared inside. Wallace followed and watched each of her actions. She grabbed the same white binder from before, checked it, and set it aside. She then looked at a large marker board with every patient's name and room number before she moved to a bookcase and grabbed a black folder. She flipped through papers inside before she plucked one free and handed it to a nurse sitting behind a computer.

Wallace looked to elgyem and the moment their eyes met the psychic-type lit up his red lights, flashing them every few seconds. Wallace tore his eyes away from elgyem as Nurse Joie came out of the station, her head shaking before she even reached him.

"I checked my archive and no one has been in that room for over a year, not spring two years ago," Nurse Joie said. "We had a young woman come with a rash from a brush with a horde of poison-types. She stayed for a week and after she left the room was cleaned and it's been vacant since not even visitors have stayed in there. You must be confused."

Wallace pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and groaned, backing away. When he pulled his hands away his vision flooded with globs of color, but another color, verdant green pulled his attention to elgyem who was flashing his lights again, green this time, down the hall.

Wallace followed elgyem's signal to the end of the hall where he caught a glimpse of Don walking into Nat's empty room. "Don," he breathed, tearing off from the nurse's station. He ignored Nurse Joie's warning not to run as he pounded down the hall and slid to a stop in front of the room.

"Please, tell me I'm not crazy and that this is weird, right?" he asked, expecting Don's reaction to mirror his, but Don didn't seem concerned with the room as he was embraced into the arms of Reed. Both of their heads snapped in his direction as he intruded on their moment, Don, in particular, looked less than thrilled to see him.

"What?" Wallace whispered. "What's going on? What are you doing?"

Don's eyes fell to the floor as he released his hold around Reed's neck and stepped back. "I'm visiting my boyfriend at work," Don said. "Why do you need to know?"

His anger vanished. The building frustration, topped with the expectation of Don's reaction to finding his brother's room empty collided head-on with the searing sight of Don in Reed's arms. He felt sick, and weak like he'd never left the pool and was still drowning. He lungs were filling and his veins were screaming for oxygen and his body was sinking, about to touch the bottom.

Reed's arm snaked around Don's midsection and came to rest on his hip as he pulled him closer. "Three nights a week I visit patients to spread the word of the NRR to them," he said. "It can be encouraging to hear the word of what our gods can do and how knowledge and worship can heal."

"There's no one here," Wallace said, his voice sounding like it belonged to someone much younger, possible someone of a different gender. He hoped he would trigger Don to realize what his entire crusade was about, but Reed was the one to respond.

"I haven't started yet," Reed said, squeezing Don's hip. "Donnie just came by to visit me before I made my rounds."

"The room is empty!" Wallace yelled through his teeth, fighting back the urge to scream and cry. "Don, where's Nat?

Don's eyes narrowed as his lip curled. "Who's Nat?"

* * *

End of Chapter Forty-Two

* * *

 **Question of the Chapter #41:** Do you think there is a place for Wallace at school?


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